WaPo: “A divided Supreme Court on Monday restored an Alabama congressional map that creates only one district favorable to a Black candidate, and put on hold a lower court’s order that said a second district was necessary to comply with the Voting Rights Act.
Over the objections of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s three liberals, its five most consistently conservative justices halted a decision last month by three federal judges. The panel threw out Alabama’s new congressional map, which included only one congressional district with a majority of Black voters even though they make up more than a quarter of the state’s population.
The court’s ruling was a blow to voting rights advocates and Democrats after a series of redistricting wins over the past several weeks. It means the 2022 congressional elections in Alabama will take place under a map drawn by the state’s Republican leaders.:
See also – “Brett Kavanaugh’s Defense of the Shadow Docket Is Alarming” from Slate:
“Yesterday, the Supreme Court was asked to decide whether to issue a “stay” of the two lower-court rulings in the Alabama cases while Alabama appealed them — a move that would have prevented the lower-court decisions from going into effect. The lower courts had blocked Alabama’s maps on the grounds the state had willfully refused to create a second majority Black congressional district, instead divvying up Black neighborhoods to inflate white residents’ voting power. Stays are supposed to be an “extraordinary” remedy meant for extraordinary cases — where three different things are true: First, the party seeking a stay must be likely to win their appeal. Second, it must be the case that not freezing the lower-court ruling while it is appealed would cause the appealing party “irreparable harm,” that is, harm that a successful appeal could not adequately remedy. And third, the public interest — to both the parties and society at large — must be served by such relief. What this test hopefully drives home is that stays are (supposed to be) rarely granted, and are (supposed to be) limited to cases where lower courts didn’t just err, but erred in ways that cause immediate, harmful effects to the party that lost.
…Instead, what’s really going on in this case is made crystal clear by Chief Justice John Roberts’ technical (but analytically devastating) dissent. Roberts’ short opinion expressed sympathy for Alabama’s claims on the merits, but also stressed the fundamental problem with the court’s use of the shadow docket: That ruling for Alabama will require the court to make new law, because “the District Court properly applied existing law in an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction” (emphasis mine). In other words, Roberts voted against staying the lower-court rulings because they were correct under the law as it exists today, even if he’s perfectly willing to change those laws tomorrow. Against that backdrop, it becomes clear why the ultraconservative majority came out the other way — not because the Justices disagree with Chief Justice Roberts that the district courts were right, but because they are willing to change the law today.”