The Supreme Court shocked just about everyone when conservative justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh sided with their progressive colleagues to rule that Alabama’s recently redrawn congressional maps discriminated against Black voters.
Author David Daley, a senior fellow of voting rights advocacy group FairVote, told The New Abnormal’s Danielle Moodie what makes the decision all the more extraordinary is that Chief Justice Roberts has made “his life’s work to try and gut the Voting Rights Act” for more than 35 years.
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“The chief justice quite well could have looked at this as a pretty easy bone to throw,” he said. “He’s also very aware of the court’s institutional problems and the court’s ethical problems and the very low standing with which the American public currently view this court.”
He said while the Alabama decision is definitely a win for democracy, it will be interesting to see if it shapes the court’s view on future decisions.
“It’s really, really important as you do to view this decision as good news, but to view it… in the context of a court that for a decade has been really radically shrinking these protections,” Daley said. “They could have said, well, not much is going to be lost here because if you do the math on this even if Democrats are able to win back a seat in Alabama, a seat in Georgia, a seat in Louisiana, and two seats in Texas, Republicans will have been able to gain perhaps more seats than that simply through the mid-decade redistricting that they're gonna pull off in North Carolina and Ohio where they will be doing a really radical mid decade partisan gerrymanders.”
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