This is an opinion column.
The most important thing to understand about the bill that gave us Alabama’s latest Congressional map is that, for the most part, it’s a lie.
It pretends to protect the Black Belt, where Alabama’s Black voters are concentrated, but it makes a second majority-Black congressional district impossible to draw.
It uses six of its eight pages to list “legislative findings” which didn’t even come from the Legislature, but from a state’s attorney still sore he lost the biggest case of his career before the U.S. Supreme Court and who seems determined to get a do-over.
It pretends to be one thing. But it’s something nasty, deceptive and all too common in Alabama.
It’s a lie.
The new map is before the federal courts, which must decide whether it was drawn to diminish the power of Black voters by denying them a second majority-Black congressional district.
SB 5, the bill that accompanies that map and makes it state law, uses six of its eight pages to spell out “legislative findings.”
“The Legislature finds and declares the following …” it begins.
Only the Legislature never found any such things. The conclusions it reaches were not the work product of lawmakers, none of it came from the hours of committee meetings or the testimony of interested parties. It’s not the product of debate on the State House floor.
Rather, those pages were fed to them by the state’s solicitor general, Edmund LaCour, and the lawmakers who led the state’s redistricting effort said, under oath, that they had no idea what they were for.
One of the reapportionment committee co-chairs, Rep. Chris Pringle, didn’t even know who had written them or where they had come from, according to a deposition he gave earlier this month.
Q. Did you know that these would be in the bill?
A. No, sir.
Q. Did the redistricting committee solicit anyone to draft these findings?
A. No, sir.
Q. Do you know why they’re in here?
A. No.
Q. Remind me, have you ever seen another redistricting bill contain similar language like this, these findings?
A. Not to my knowledge, no.
The other co-chair, Sen. Steve Livingston, testified that LaCour had given him the findings to include in the bill, but he didn’t know why or what they were for, either.
Imagine for a moment, that you received a report from your doctor’s office that said “lab analysis” but then you found out later the results didn’t come from a lab and that no lab technicians had anything to do with what you got back, that might concern you.
But the Alabama Legislature did something very similar and a majority of those members don’t seem to think that’s a problem.
They abdicated their duties to a lawyer from the Attorney General’s office and then washed their hands of it.
So the next question is, if these mystery pages are now Alabama law, what do they do?
For the most part, they define “communities of interest” a term of art in redistricting for people with similar interests who shouldn’t be divided if the map drawers can help it.
The bill defines three such communities — the Black Belt, the Wiregrass and the coastal counties of Mobile and Baldwin.
Apparently, there are no “communities of interest” in north Alabama.
We’ll come back to that.
The state’s map does not keep the Black Belt together, and neither do maps drawn by the plaintiffs suing the state. Because of its size, it’s all but impossible. But the so-called legislative findings say the Black Belt should be divided among no more than two districts.
The Wiregrass and the Coastal Counties get better treatment. They are to be kept together.
Why does any of this matter? Because the state solicitor is trying to rewrite the rules of congressional map drawing in Alabama — and if you play by those new rules, it becomes almost impossible to draw a second majority Black congressional district.
But what’s telling here is that there are only three such communities of interest.
There is no TVA Community, although you could argue that north Alabama counties have a shared interest in where their electricity comes from.
There is no Appalachian Community, no Aerospace Community, nor Southern Rust Belt community.
The bill argues that Troy University somehow binds together the Wiregrass as an unbreakable community of interest, while the same map splits Tuscaloosa County, home of the state’s largest university.
It only recognizes those communities that achieve the bill’s ultimate end: To make a second majority Black congressional district impossible to draw.
It’s written to hurt Democrats and benefit Republicans.
It’s designed to make sure white people are over-represented in Congress.
Because in the Alabama Legislature, that’s the only community of interest that has ever mattered.
Go deeper with more columns by Kyle Whitmire
Next level: Meet the architect behind Alabama’s voting rights defiance
Deep: The moment Alabama’s lawyers turned a sure thing into blistering defeat
Deeper: Alabama’s new congressional map is a feat of Republican cowardice
Deepest: How 155 angy Confederates chained Alabama to its shameful past