Alabama officials appealed Tuesday to the Supreme Court, seeking intervention so they can use a congressional map awfully similar to the one said Supreme Court knocked down less than three months ago.
After the Supreme Court nixed the old map in Allen v. Milligan this June, the Alabama legislators were supposed to craft a new one that gave Black voters at least the opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice in two congressional districts.
Alabama turned in a new map…with only one such district.
A federal panel of judges struck the map down Tuesday, asserting that they are “troubled” by the “extraordinary circumstance” of the legislators flatly ignoring what the court instructed them to do. With “no reason to believe” that the legislature would produce an adequate map if given another try, the judges wrote that they are assigning the map-drawing to a special master.
Alabama officials quickly appealed that decision, seemingly hoping that slightly tweaking the map would be enough to peel off one of the conservative justices who voted against it last time.
“The State appears to have charted new waters: we found no other Section Two case in which a State conceded on remedy that a plan enacted after a liability finding did not include the additional opportunity district that the court said was required,” the judges wrote.
