by Sean Begin
The Supreme Court is once again set to make news Wednesday.
The justices will gather in Washington to hear the Alabama redistricting case that sprung up after the Republican-controlled Alabama senate rearranged districts following the 2010 U.S. census.
A little background on redistricting for those unfamiliar with the term. Every ten years, the government awards or reduces the number of representatives a state has based on the population that state has based on the new census data.
A state Congress is then responsible for redrawing district lines to suit their new number of representatives. After Republicans gained control of the Alabama legislature for the first time in more than a century, the lines were redrawn so that black voters were jammed into already black-majority districts.
Alabama Democrats allege that the GOP did this intentionally, to give themselves a better chance of winning future elections. And while the Voting Rights Act allows for this sort of legal gerrymandering as a means of increasing the chances of minorities being elected, the Alabama Democrats allege the Republicans went too far.
“This case is ultimately about whether states (in good faith or bad) will unnecessarily turn the Voting Rights Act into a racial straightjacket and, perversely, into a barrier for interracial political coalitions,” wrote lawyers for the Alabama Democratic Conference in papers filed in court.
Alabama has a long and complex history of civil rights, race and politics. It was in Birmingham that Dr. Martin Luther King led the movement to give African-Americans the equal rights they deserved after decades of living under legal segregation.
The issue here isn’t that using race to draw district lines is a bad idea. That’s why the Voting Rights Act has a provision allowing for it. In spirit, it’s meant to give minorities greater chances to elect representatives.
But as America becomes an increasingly multicultural country this idea becomes impotent. Should the justices decide that Alabama’s redistricting violated the Constitution, (and hopefully they will) it could mean an end to using race as a way to set district lines, something that would mean progress for diversifying districts.