The second biggest disaster of the George W. Bush presidency … after the Iraq War … was elevating John Roberts to the Supreme Court. Roberts is the equivalent of Daddy’s choice of Souter … a weak man, whose strongest conviction was to please his liberal friends like Tom Rath and Warren Rudman, and get pats on the head and attaboys from the New York Times.
Roberts’ latest assault on the Constitution is his ruling that the Voting Rights Act requires Alabama to create two “minority-majority” districts. Democrats are celebrating … as they should … because the ruling seems to require Louisiana, Georgia and North Carolina to also create “minority-majority” districts, which is a lovely euphemism for a rigged map that guarantees Democrats seats. From Atlantic:
Many Democrats believe that the ruling will have a domino effect on other pending cases and ultimately force three southern states—not only Alabama but also Louisiana and Georgia—to each add a new majority-minority district before the congressional election, which would almost certainly flip seats currently held by Republicans. Texas might have to add as many as five majority-minority districts to its map. “
The question presented is whether §2 of the Act, as amended, requires the State of Alabama to intentionally redraw its longstanding congressional districts so that black voters can control a number of seats roughly proportional to the black share of the State’s population. Section 2 demands no such thing, and, if it did, the Constitution would not permit it.
… the plaintiffs here demand that Alabama carve up not two but three of its main urban centers on the basis of race, and that it configure those urban centers’ black neighborhoods with the outlying majority-black rural areas so that black voters can control not one but two of the State’s seven districts. The Federal Judiciary now upholds their demand—overriding the State’s undoubted interest in preserving the core of its existing districts, its plainly reasonable desire to maintain the Gulf Coast region as a cohesive political unit, and its persuasive arguments that a race-neutral districting process would not produce anything like the districts the plaintiffs seek.
