Supreme Court's Surprise Ruling Divides Conservative Justices

A Supreme Court ruling on Thursday had two conservative justices siding with the Court's liberal members in a decision that gives President Joe Biden a victory.

The ruling in the case, Allen v. Milligan, ordered Alabama to redraw congressional districts that were created by Republicans in 2021. Biden and civil rights activists had argued that the district maps discriminated against Black voters.

The argument against the current congressional map is that only one of the state's seven districts is majority Black, even though 27 percent of Alabama's population is Black.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, both conservatives, sided with the Court's liberal justices—Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson—in affirming a lower court's decision that the Alabama Republicans' map violated the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting.

In March, Biden said voting rights were "under assault" in Alabama during a visit to Selma for an event to mark the 58th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march, in which Black voting rights activists were assaulted by state troopers.

"Alabama enacted a new congressional map that discriminated against Black voters by failing to include what should've been a new predominately Black district," Biden said at the event.

He went on, "The right to vote and to have your vote counted is the threshold of democracy and liberty. With it, anything is possible. Without that right, nothing is possible, and this fundamental right remains under assault."

In Thursday's ruling, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas—joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch—wrote in a dissent that he "would resolve these cases in a way that would not require the Federal Judiciary to decide the correct racial apportionment of Alabama's congressional seats."

Thomas also said that "any benchmark other than a race-neutral one would render the vote dilution inquiry fundamentally circular, allowing courts to conclude that a districting plan 'dilutes' a minority's voting strength 'on account of race' merely because it does not measure up to an ideal already defined in racial terms."

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland applauded the Court's ruling in a statement.

"Today's decision rejects efforts to further erode fundamental voting rights protections, and preserves the principle that in the United States, all eligible voters must be able to exercise their constitutional right to vote free from discrimination based on their race," he said.

Contacted by Newsweek for comment, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund sent a statement that included comments from Deuel Ross, the LDF's deputy director of litigation, who argued on behalf of the plaintiffs before the Court in October.

"This decision is a crucial win against the continued onslaught of attacks on voting rights," Ross said. "Alabama attempted to rewrite federal law by saying race could not be considered in the redistricting process even when necessary to remedy racial discrimination.

"But because of the state's sordid and well-documented pattern of persisting racial discrimination, race must be considered to ensure communities of color are not boxed out of the electoral process," Ross said.