Here is a a familiar story. On Tuesday night, The Supreme Court ruled that will give the Republican Party an additional seat in the US House of Representatives. Not all of the justices revealed how they voted, but the decision appears to be 6-3 along the lines of partisanship — that is, six Republican justices voted to give the GOP another House seat, while three of the Court’s Democrats dissented.
In fairness, the GOP’s most recent decision was doomed Allen v. Milligan fits a broader pattern in the corruption cases of this Supreme Court that can be explained without accusing the Republican judges of deciding election cases. only on the basis of fandom. The court has spent the last seven years to break all federal protections against poaching.
Allen fits this pattern. On the face of it, the Republican justices’ brief opinion in that case is just the next step in an iterative process toward a legal regime where states can draw maps as they wish, regardless of whether those maps are drawn to favor one political party, or if they are interested in locking non-white voters out of office.
But the new ruling by the Republican party judges seems clear because, when Allen opinion is consistent with the Court’s broader tendency to prevent chaos, its actual legal arguments are inconsistent with what those same judges said. as recently as a month ago. That decision is also inconsistent with previous orders that the Republican majority in the Court gave in Allen the case itself.
If you want a complete summary of all these inconsistencies, go read Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s opinion in this recent decision. There are so many of them that it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Republicans on the Court are dishonest about their true motivations. The simplest explanation for Tuesday night’s decision is that the Republican majority on the Court is bending the rules because they want the Republican Party to hold a majority in Congress.
Decision in Allen it breaks the law that the Supreme Court announced a month ago
At the end of April, the majority of Republicans in the Court gave Louisiana vs. Callaiswhich completed a project that at least one member of the majority began more than four decades ago.
In 1982, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation to expand the Voting Rights Actfederal law prohibiting racial discrimination in elections. Among other things, the 1982 amendment specified that many state election laws that adversely affect non-white voters are unconstitutional, even if the plaintiff challenges the law. cannot prove that the law was enacted with discriminatory intent.
While this bill was being debated in Congress, however, there was a conservative faction within the Reagan administration that opposed it, and that urged Reagan to veto it to no avail. The future Chief Justice John Roberts was a member of this group, and as a junior lawyer he ended up doing many of the granular tasks often assigned to young lawyers. Among other things, Roberts wrote about two dozen memos opposing the 1982 amendmentand he prepared speeches and talking points for attorney generals who also objected.
Although Roberts’ faction was defeated in 1982, Roberts maintained his resentment against Reagan’s revisions to the VRA, and his faction eventually took over the Republican Party. All six Republican members of the Court joined Calliswhich repealed the 1982 amendment and put in place a new law requiring voting rights petitioners to challenge a gerrymandered map to show that state legislators acted with racial intent.
Under Callisa plaintiff who raises such an objection can only prevail “when circumstances exist providing a strong presumption that intentional discrimination occurred.”
In Allen case, however, a three-judge panel that included two Trump-appointed judges ruled that “we cannot understand (Alabama’s new congressional maps) as anything other than a deliberate effort to reduce the voting power of Black Alabamians.” The panel reached that conclusion with surprising depth 571 pages of reviews released in 2023. After Callas, The Supreme Court ordered the panel to reconsider its decision, and the panel did not reverse its decision — again concluding that Alabama engaged in intentional racial discrimination.
Among other things, the panel said Alabama’s 2023 redistricting law met its racial goals by holding together a predominantly white area of the state known as Gulf Coastwhile dividing the predominantly Black area known as the Black Belt. Ironically, the 2023 state law said that the Gulf Coast would be “integrated to the fullest extent possible,” in part because Alabama lawmakers wanted to preserve “a distinct culture stemming from its French and Spanish colonial heritage.”
The state legislature, in other words, wrote into the law itself that it wanted to preserve the European American region of the state’s ability to choose its preferred representative, while the same law also broke the African-American region of Alabama. If that doesn’t provide a strong presumption that intentional discrimination occurred, nothing does.
The latest comments by Republican justices in the Allenat the same time, it is only four pages. And he uses just one sentence to answer hundreds of pages of evidence gathered by the lower court, which shows that Alabama engaged in intentional racial discrimination. According to the judges of the Republic, the lower court”he did not consider the concept of legal good faith” that judges should apply to state legislators accused of racism.
So, in summary, just over a month after the Republicans on the Court announced their entry Callis that racial harassment plaintiffs can still prevail if they can show that a state legislature engaged in intentional racial discrimination, the same Republicans appear to have abandoned that law. And the result is that the Republican Party gets an additional seat in the White House.
GOP judges’ Allen the opinion is not even consistent with their previous decisions in the same case
Like Sotomayor he explains in his oppositionThere are several other examples of Republican justices taking one position in earlier decisions, then abandoning them to hand the victory to Alabama Republicans.
The saddest thing is that, inside CallisRepublican judges clearly said that “we have not ignored Allen,” reference to the decision of the Supreme Court 2023 in the same case, where the Court struck the maps of Alabama and ordered it to draw a new one. Now it is clear that the Republican judges were lying when they said that Callis. 2023 Court Decision Allen held that Alabama must draw a map with at least two Black congressional districts, when its 2026 decision Allen maintains that Alabama does not need to do so after Callis. So Callis revoked the 2023 opinion Allen.
Sotomayor also spends much of her opinion warning that the latest Court Allen that decision may cause “chaos” in the next Alabama congressional election, because the primaries in that election should be held on August 11, leaving the state with very little time to complete the time-consuming task of reviewing each voter’s record to ensure that they are assigned to the correct district.
According to Sotomayor, after a federal district court threw out the original version of Alabama’s 2022 maps, the state told the Supreme Court that it needed to block the decision because the district court issued it four months before the primary election, and “four months was not enough time to change congressional maps.” Sotomayor’s fellow Republicans seem to agree with that claim. In fact, when the Court agreed to block the 2022 ruling, two justices warned that a lower court order “would require heroic efforts and . . .
So, when a lower court ruled that would benefit the Democratic Party by requiring Alabama to draw a map that would elect an additional Black Democrat, the Republican judges seem to have concluded that four months was not enough time for Alabama to comply. Now, however, the same judges have ruled that the government can withdraw those same “heroic efforts” in just two months.
To be fair, Judicial Republicans have frequently ruled against their political party when that party presents a weak argument. In 2020, for example, the Supreme Court rejected President Donald Trump’s attempt to reverse his loss to former President Joe Biden.
As I wrote at the time, handing Trump a victory would require a major judicial effort, because Biden won by a large enough margin that the Court would have it. it is necessary to reverse the election results in three different states. That was big even for this Supreme Court.
But this is still the Supreme Court holding 2024 that Trump is allowed use the power of the presidency to commit a crime. So Republican judges are willing to do extraordinary favors to their political party and its leadership, even if they don’t do the GOP’s bidding in every case before them.
It’s safe to say, in other words, that Republican judges are putting their thumb on the scale for the 2026 midterms. That’s not the same as putting a one-ton sack of cement on the scale. But the most plausible explanation for the behavior of GOP judges is that they want to benefit the Republican Party and are willing to go against their previous decisions to do so.
