Alabama’s Redistricting Case Back Before SCOTUS And Honestly This Should Be A Lay-Up

to freeze the lower court’s ruling and allow it to use the 2023 map in the upcoming elections. That map, Bowdre wrote, “addressed this Court’s concerns about the State’s prioritization of core retention” – the principle of trying to have districts resemble their earlier iterations as closely as possible – “at the cost of splitting the Black Belt region,” an area in central Alabama originally named for its rich, dark soil but now named for its large Black population, the descendants of formerly enslaved people. The 2023 map, Bowdre said, divided the Black Belt “as little as possible, while also keeping together the Gulf Coast as the State had done for 50 years.”