This is an opinion column.
“Alabama lost!” I shouted.
“Again?” my son asked. “Who did we play this time?”
“Ourselves?” I said aloud. And then, “No, but this isn’t about football …”
My son still didn’t understand, but the more I thought about it later, the better I felt about my answer.
Alabama had played itself.
Last October, the state’s top lawyers walked into the U.S. Supreme Court last October expecting home cookin’, and why not? The last time the state took a Voting Rights Act case there, the justices gutted much of the law.
This time the state had come for the rest of it.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall shook hands with a few folks in the courtroom on his way in and smiled as he took a seat behind the defense table. The solicitor general, Edmund LaCour, would make the oral arguments on the state’s behalf. Both looked confident and Marshall seemed excited to be there.
Three sets of plaintiffs had sued on behalf of Black Alabama voters, arguing the state’s white Republican majority had stacked and packed minority voters into one congressional district to dilute their influence in all the others.
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Of course, they had, but did anyone expect this court to think that was a bad thing?
The state’s team seemed confident.
The game was rigged, the ending already set — or so many thought. I was one of them.
But two hours later, when that hearing had ended, something had changed.
From the courtroom, I walked down the white marble stairs to the media room behind the beat reporters from the national news outlets. One turned to her cohort.
“Did Alabama just lose?��� she asked.
There was a pause. A few folks laughed.
Nah! They couldn’t, right? Right?
It seemed too great of a leap from the conventional wisdom just a few hours earlier. But there was no denying — win or lose — Alabama hadn’t done well.
LaCour had come to argue for an effective end to the Voting Rights Act’s effect on congressional redistricting. But few of the justices, including some of the court’s most conservative, seemed to buy it.
Justice Samuel Alito called the state’s position “far-reaching” and tried to nudge LaCour toward a softer spot in the law — what a reasonably compact district might look like, as required under the precedents, perhaps.
LaCour briefly obliged but then veered back into the flailing, failing arguments Alito had tried to save him from.
It’s Kremlinology, for sure, but the court’s conservative majority seemed to want an incremental step for weakening the law, not a revolutionary one for killing it entirely. Alabama had overreached.
At least that’s how I read the room. LaCour didn’t seem to read it at all.
Time would tell.
And Thursday it did — catching me off guard in my living room, where I shouted the news out loud to my 7-year-old son. In a 5-4 majority, the court sided with the plaintiffs. The state had wronged Black voters, and Alabama will have to redraw its congressional districts.
Since the ruling, Marshall has said he would continue to fight for the current district lines in court and would take the case back to trial at the district level.
“Although the majority’s decision is disappointing, this case is not over,” he said in a statement.
Deuel Ross, a lawyer for the plaintiffs who argued the case before the court, told me Marshall had already cost the state enough.
“Alabama will owe at least hundreds of thousands, likely millions of dollars, in attorneys fees for its complete loss at the Supreme Court,” Ross said. “It would waste more of Alabama taxpayers’ money to continue to litigate this issue when it’s clear that there’s nothing — no valid argument — that Alabama could bring which the Supreme Court hasn’t already rejected.”
But that’s often our way, unfortunately.
Our elected officials have their parties, and in Alabama, those parties come roughly color-coded by race, but once in office, our officials are supposed to represent all people. They are supposed to represent everyone’s interests — not just one side or the other.
That didn’t happen. It hardly ever happens.
Our state government lost because those officials didn’t uphold their duty — to draw fair lines for fair elections.
But a few righteously stubborn folks wouldn’t accept that.
So, Alabama took itself to court.
Alabama, the state government, lost today.
Alabama, its people, won.
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