A Southern man don’t need them around, anyhow
Ala-by God-bama!
“In an echo of mid-century southern defiance of school desegregation, the Yellowhammer State’s Republican-controlled legislature defied the conservative-dominated Court’s directive to redraw its congressional map with an additional Black-majority district,” Adam Serwer explains in The Atlantic:
Openly defying a Supreme Court order is rare—almost as rare as conservative justices recognizing that the Fifteenth Amendment outlaws racial discrimination in voting. Under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, states are sometimes required to draw districts with majority-minority populations. This requirement exists because after Reconstruction, one of the methods southern states used to disenfranchise their Black populations was racially gerrymandering congressional districts so that Black voters could not affect the outcome of congressional elections. Earlier this year, Alabama asked the Supreme Court to further weaken the Voting Rights Act so as to preserve its racial gerrymander.
More than a quarter of Alabama’s population is Black, but the state’s Republican majority has racially gerrymandered that population into a single district out of seven because it fears those voters might elect Democrats. The partisan motive is no excuse for racial discrimination—1870s Democrats also had a partisan interest in disenfranchising Black voters, who were then reliably Republican. After failing to get the Supreme Court to overturn Section 2, Alabama decided that following the law was optional.
Hell, yeah!
Even as the right criticizes Democrats’ calls for ethics rules for the court in light of conservative justices’ non-transparency about gifts from ultra-rich supporters, Alabama reserves the right to ignore court rulings it dislikes. Democrats’ complaints only further deligitimize the Roberts court, dontcha know? Conservative states reserve the right to treat unfavorable court rulings as mere recommendations.
At one point, the right-wing legal martyr and originalist Robert Bork was so frustrated by the Court being insufficiently conservative that he declared, “As our institutional arrangements now stand, the Court can never be made a legitimate element of a basically democratic polity.” In the right’s view, the judiciary was an “imperial judiciary,” an “out of control branch of government.”
That’s the highfalutin way conservatives say that the only legitimate court is one in which heads, they win and tails, libs lose. SCOTUS is illegitimate when rulings go against states like Alabama. See, “voiding constitutional prohibitions on racial discrimination” is a southern tradition. Heritage. Like slavery and the Confederate battle flag.
Serwer is even more blunt:
It is clear the right that views the Court as a political instrument for imposing conservative policy, and when the Court fails to heed its obligation to do so, they can simply ignore it. This is consistent with the movement’s Trumpist turn toward the belief that the legitimacy of any practice or institution—elections, fundamental freedoms, the state itself—is conferred not by the consent of the governed but by the consent of the right. You have an inalienable access to the franchise as long as you vote Republican. You have free speech as long as you say conservative things. The free market is free only when it leads to conservative outcomes. The Supreme Court’s rulings are the law of the land, except if those rulings are not what conservatives want.
Not to single out the South exclusively, that’s also how Ohio Republicans treat their state Supreme Court’s rulings.
The Democracy Optional Party. Ain’t that grand?