By Jen Rice
Alabama lawmakers are on the verge of giving final approval to a pair of gerrymandered congressional and state senate maps.
If allowed by federal courts to go into effect, the maps would immediately strip Black voters in the state of political representation in the wake of last week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act.
An Alabama Senate committee greenlit legislation Thursday to use a congressional map that was previously struck down by courts under the very provision the U.S. Supreme Court gutted last week. The measure was approved by the House Wednesday. Next, it will get a final vote from the full Senate, and, if approved, go to the governor’s desk.
A House committee vote on a similar bill impacting state senate districts is expected shortly.
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There are two major reasons why Alabama should not currently be redrawing its maps in an eleventh hour special session.
First, absentee voting in Alabama’s May 19 primary election has already begun. And secondly, the state is bound by a legal agreement to use its existing congressional map through 2030.
However, that hasn’t stopped Alabama Republicans from racing to roll back Black voters’ political representation in time for the current election cycle. State officials have filed multiple requests with federal courts asking that injunctions be lifted immediately so the state can use congressional and state senate maps that were previously struck down for violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures (D), whose district is targeted by the plan, testified at the Senate committee hearing, saying he was there to defend voters, not his job.
“I ran into a gentleman last night and he said, ‘Hey, man, I hear your job is on the line.’ And I told him, ‘No, Shomari Figures is going to be okay. Your voice is on the line,” Figures said.
Figures went on to slam the Supreme Court for gutting voting protections that are still needed to prevent hard-fought progress from being rolled back.
“We cannot pretend that that progress will remain, no more than we can assume that a cake can bake in an oven you turned off yesterday,” he said. “We have to keep those protections.”
Alabama is one of four Southern states rushing to eliminate minority political representation in the aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling, along with Louisiana, Tennessee and South Carolina.
State Sen. Linda Coleman-Madison (D) told her Republican colleagues that supporting the gerrymander means casting a vote to continue Alabama’s long, painful history of racism.
“How long are we going to have to repeat history before we realize that all people deserve to be respected and deserve to have the feeling that they are valued?” Coleman-Madison said.
Generations of Black Alabamians won’t stop fighting, she added amid loud applause from the public.
“I’m going to be here forever. It may not be this face, but it’s going to be one that looks like me, and they’re just waiting right now,” she said.
The GOP-held Tennessee General Assembly Thursday changed state law to adopt a new congressional map that dilutes the state’s only Black-majority district and breaks up its lone Democratic seat.
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