# Supreme Court upholds the Voting Rights Act in Alabama?!
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/supreme-court-upholds-the-voting-rights-act-in-alabama/985204
**Category:** Politics & Elections
**Created:** [June 8, 2023, 3:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/supreme-court-upholds-the-voting-rights-act-in-alabama/985204 "2023-06-08T15:15:14Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2023, 3:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/supreme-court-upholds-the-voting-rights-act-in-alabama/985204/1 "2023-06-08T15:15:14Z")
> **[Supreme Court: Alabama’s voting maps unfair to Black residents](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/06/08/supreme-court-alabama-redistricting-voting-rights/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWJpZCI6IjMyNzA5ODEiLCJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNjg2MTk2ODAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNjg3NDkyNzk5LCJpYXQiOjE2ODYxOTY4MDAsImp0aSI6IjExNzA3ZjgxLTI2YzItNDllNS04M2Q0LTBkYjVkMDA2OTc1OCIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS9wb2xpdGljcy8yMDIzLzA2LzA4L3N1cHJlbWUtY291cnQtYWxhYmFtYS1yZWRpc3RyaWN0aW5nLXZvdGluZy1yaWdodHMvIn0.6FMatwEpVSFQbc9UE9vvsqsnHg8gbhDJAQSvYVMIh0A&itid=gfta)**
>
> The decision was a surprise from a court whose conservative majority had signaled it was suspicious of prioritizing race over traditional redistricting techniques.
> [@](#):
>
> A divided Supreme Court on Thursday said the Alabama legislature should have created a second congressional district in which Black voters had a chance of electing a representative of their choice.
>
> [The decision](https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-1086_1co6.pdf), written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., bucked the court’s recent trend of decisions that weakened provisions of the Voting Rights Act. He was joined by fellow conservative Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberals, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
>
> “We see no reason to disturb the District Court’s careful factual findings,” Roberts wrote, adding that Alabama was asking for a radical rewrite of the court’s precedents.
I am astonished. Could there be hope that Roberts is chastened, and will at least occasionally back away from his apocalyptic radicalism?
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### Author:  [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Other_Waldo_Pepper)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2023, 3:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/supreme-court-upholds-the-voting-rights-act-in-alabama/985204/2 "2023-06-08T15:16:56Z")
What, it can’t just be a balls-and-strikes call?
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### Author:  [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2023, 3:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/supreme-court-upholds-the-voting-rights-act-in-alabama/985204/3 "2023-06-08T15:18:50Z")
Could you rephrase that using a Dungeons and Dragons metaphor, please?
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### Author:  [@Johnny\_Bravo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Bravo)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2023, 3:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/supreme-court-upholds-the-voting-rights-act-in-alabama/985204/4 "2023-06-08T15:37:35Z")
“Roberts has famously said that the DM’s job is to enforce RAW rather than RAI.”
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### Author:  [@ratatoskK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ratatoskK)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2023, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/supreme-court-upholds-the-voting-rights-act-in-alabama/985204/5 "2023-06-08T15:38:07Z")
I am thankful for this crumb of sanity. It does not erase their other misdeeds.
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### Author:  [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2023, 3:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/supreme-court-upholds-the-voting-rights-act-in-alabama/985204/6 "2023-06-08T15:40:23Z")
Much better, thank you!
I’ll go back to the baseball analogy, now that I’ve had time to think about it: if the New York Mets had decided that they didn’t like the current slate of umpires, and had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a campaign to hire new umpires that were favorable to them, and had stretched MLB’s rules to the breaking point to prevent hiring umpires that weren’t favorable to them, and the new umpires were consistently making calls that were upsetting years of baseball tradition in order to favor the Mets, and if people were getting increasingly irate and vowing to boycott Mets games and to launch their own campaigns to hire other umpires, and one of the umps finally made a decision that wasn’t a radical departure from years of baseball tradition…
…no, I wouldn’t regard it as a balls-and-strikes call.
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### Author:  [@Cervaise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cervaise)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2023, 3:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/supreme-court-upholds-the-voting-rights-act-in-alabama/985204/7 "2023-06-08T15:41:07Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#):
>
> Could there be hope that Roberts is chastened, and will at least occasionally back away from his apocalyptic radicalism?
No. He very occasionally manufactures a low-impact centrist decision (and this is a low-impact decision compared to the other issues they’ve decided, as it largely preserves decades of status quo) as camouflage for what is otherwise a gallopingly activist court. He does this so he has something to point to and say “see?”
I mean, it’s a good (no-brainer) decision, but it is not at all a new direction for the Court. It’s Roberts’s MO.
(See also his upholding of Obamacare.)
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### Author:  [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2023, 3:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/supreme-court-upholds-the-voting-rights-act-in-alabama/985204/8 "2023-06-08T15:43:43Z")
> [@Cervaise](#):
>
> I mean, it’s a good (no-brainer) decision, but it is not at all a new direction for the Court. It’s Roberts’s MO.
>
> (See also his upholding of Obamacare.)
Obamacare is the only other example I could think of, although I’d hardly call it “low-impact.” I think that, of the apocalyptic radicals on the court, he’s the least apocalyptically radical. But in a group of DMs that consistently favors bards and makes all their rules decisions to favor bardic class abilities–a group of DMs chosen by bard-players, chosen through really underhanded means–his occasional ruling in favor of int-based classes is insufficient to redeem him.
I hope he’s running scared, though, because I’m an optimist.
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### Author:  [@BeepKillBeep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BeepKillBeep)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2023, 3:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/supreme-court-upholds-the-voting-rights-act-in-alabama/985204/9 "2023-06-08T15:53:12Z")
As a bard, I support his pro-bard agenda. However, as a good aligned bard, I just cannot get behind his overall agenda.
(for the record, that was a joke, bard being a replacement for “white male Christian”, I do not support that at all)
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### Author:  [@BobLibDem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobLibDem)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2023, 3:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/supreme-court-upholds-the-voting-rights-act-in-alabama/985204/10 "2023-06-08T15:56:57Z")
Brett Kavanaugh voting for the forces of good was a shocker.
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### Author:  [@flurb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/flurb)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2023, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/supreme-court-upholds-the-voting-rights-act-in-alabama/985204/11 "2023-06-08T16:21:15Z")
I think this is a message to Republican state legislatures that they need to pump the brakes on treating all existing judicial precedents as inapplicable now that conservatives have a majority on the Supreme Court. There’s been an absolute deluge of new laws coming out of Republican states that don’t even try to comply with existing precedents but just assume the Supreme Court will tear them up.
I read this as Roberts and Kavanaugh telling them to slow — but not necessarily stop — their roll and at least act like they’re engaged in a legitimate process of judicial deliberation.
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### Author:  [@Maserschmidt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maserschmidt)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2023, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/supreme-court-upholds-the-voting-rights-act-in-alabama/985204/12 "2023-06-08T19:14:31Z")
> Despite the ruling, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall vowed to continue the battle over the state’s maps.
>
> “Although the majority’s decision is disappointing, this case is not over,” he said in a brief statement.
Ummmm….
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### Author:  [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2023, 7:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/supreme-court-upholds-the-voting-rights-act-in-alabama/985204/13 "2023-06-08T19:31:10Z")
> [@Cervaise](#):
>
> (and this is a low-impact decision compared to the other issues they’ve decided, as it largely preserves decades of status quo)
I dunno. The court allowed those maps to stay racially segregated in 2022.
Some think this could mean a pickup of 2-4 dem seats.
>
There’s also these potential pickups:
>
>
> Marc E. Elias @marceelias
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### Author:  [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2023, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/supreme-court-upholds-the-voting-rights-act-in-alabama/985204/14 "2023-06-08T19:33:26Z")
> [@flurb](#):
>
> I read this as Roberts and Kavanaugh telling them to slow — but not necessarily stop — their roll and at least act like they’re engaged in a legitimate process
Good point — tell them that just because they can expect major precedents may be changed in a way that favors the Right, it does **not** mean **everything** State Senator Red McMagaface comes up with will be supported. Take your time, do your homework and do things properly, boys.
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### Author:  [@Jaycat.again](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jaycat.again)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2023, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/supreme-court-upholds-the-voting-rights-act-in-alabama/985204/15 "2023-06-08T21:48:28Z")
> [@BobLibDem](#):
>
> Brett Kavanaugh voting for the forces of good was a shocker.
Maybe he had had too much beer. He likes beer.
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### Author:  [@DeadTreasSecretaries](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DeadTreasSecretaries)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2023, 10:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/supreme-court-upholds-the-voting-rights-act-in-alabama/985204/16 "2023-06-08T22:39:40Z")
The [Shelby](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelby_County_v._Holder) precedent combined with the way the courts wind up handling these cases allowed Alabama to hold the 2022 election with the illegal map. Obviously it’s great news that the courts didn’t shift precedent any farther away from the VRA, and it’s great that (unless some further shenanigans are possible) there will be a good map until 2030 but the SCOTUS knows that the status quo gives states a free pass to break as much of the VRA as they want for 1 or 2 elections with the courts leaving those laws in place while they slog through the process of actually getting a ruling.
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### Author:  [@Whack-a-Mole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whack-a-Mole)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2023, 12:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/supreme-court-upholds-the-voting-rights-act-in-alabama/985204/17 "2023-06-09T00:58:33Z")
For those interested:
Full Title: **Clarence Thomas wrote a scathing, nearly 50-page dissent about why the Supreme Court should have gutted voting rights**
> **[Clarence Thomas wrote a scathing, nearly 50-page dissent about why the...](https://www.businessinsider.com/clarence-thomas-supreme-court-voting-rights-alabama-ruling-dissent-2023-6)**
>
> Thomas was one of four conservative justices who dissented in Thursday's 5-4 ruling that backed the Voting Rights Act.
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### Author:  [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2023, 1:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/supreme-court-upholds-the-voting-rights-act-in-alabama/985204/18 "2023-06-09T13:02:33Z")
Well, there’s color-blind, and then there’s willfully-blind.
Thomas seems more in the latter category.
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### Author:  [@flurb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/flurb)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2023, 3:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/supreme-court-upholds-the-voting-rights-act-in-alabama/985204/19 "2023-06-09T15:19:51Z")
> [@Whack-a-Mole](#):
>
> There’s also these potential pickups:
>
> [https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1666817739888160773](https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1666817739888160773)
Not sure whether this will result in new Democratic seats in Texas. Creating additional minority opportunity districts here means creating Hispanic-opportunity districts, and recent elections have shown that those don’t necessarily go Democratic anymore.
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### Author:  [@alphaboi867](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alphaboi867)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2023, 3:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/supreme-court-upholds-the-voting-rights-act-in-alabama/985204/20 "2023-06-09T15:22:54Z")
Pat Robertson must be freezing.
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