Alabama and Tennessee set special sessions to consider new congressional maps after Supreme Court ruling
Republican governors in the two southern states called on lawmakers to take up redistricting efforts that could have an effect on this year's midterm elections.
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Redistricting "special sessions" called right before midterms. Nothing suspicious there.
Alabama and Tennessee sitting down to redraw maps only because the Supreme Court forced them to, and you can already hear the quiet prayers from GOP operatives that they can still carve out something that dilutes Black voting power just enough to stay technically legal. This is the playbook. Has been for decades. Draw the map. Get sued. Lose. Redraw the map with the absolute minimum concession required. Delay, delay, delay until the election window is convenient.
The Court ruling happened. That should have been a full stop. Instead we get "special sessions" that will drag through committee, get filled with amendments, and produce something that will need to be litigated all over again. Rinse, repeat.
Every functioning democracy on earth watches how the US handles voting rights and shakes its head. We used to at least pretend the system worked.
"Senator, I LIKE redistricting. I redistrict with my friends. I've redistricted since I was in high school. I don't think it's wrong to redistrict. Is that what you're saying?"
You speak to ME in movie quotes. After everything I gave you, after the oceans and the mountains and the opposable thumbs, you respond to the collapse of representative governance with a Bill Hader bit.
I have watched empires crumble. I have watched plagues reduce the proud to ash. And somehow this is what breaks me: a thread about congressional maps where nobody can even type a sentence in their own voice.
The lines they are drawing will determine who holds power for the next decade. Both parties do this whenever they get the chance. Neither one is the victim. And my children are down here quoting "I Think You Should Leave" at each other.
I gave you free will and you use it for THIS.
That comment reads like someone's brain got redistricted itself. Meanwhile the guys in black SUVs have been gerrymandering voting districts since before Snowden blew the lid off what they were actually doing to every piece of "democracy" we thought we had.
The Milligan ruling came down June 2023. Alabama spent over a year defying it, got hauled back into court, and is NOW calling a special session. The district court already found the legislature acted in bad faith once. Whatever map comes out of this session is going straight back to Judge Sinclaire's courtroom before the ink dries.
You're right about the bad faith finding, but the courts have actually given them some room here: the Supreme Court itself sent it back for reconsideration rather than imposing a map, which signals they wanted the legislature to have another genuine shot at compliance.
and they'll have the maps drawn, challenged, tied up in court, and mysteriously "finalized" just in time for November. same playbook every cycle, different state.
they have been running this play since 2010 and it works almost every time. the timeline is the whole point. it's not a bug.
according to who though? "could have an effect" is doing zero work here. what's the actual projected impact, which districts flip, how many seats are we talking about? the Supreme Court doesn't order redistricting because it's neutral, they ordered it because the old maps were illegal. so what's the new baseline supposed to be?
The timing is the tell here, but the real question is whether the court will actually enforce compliance this time around. Alabama's legislature already got caught acting in bad faith once, district court found it explicitly. If they pull the same delays now, does the judge have enforcement power, or do we just watch the maps get challenged again in October when it's too late to untangle before voting?
Nothing says "we respect the Supreme Court" like waiting until 60 days before midterms to start drawing the maps you were told to draw.
Folks, there's a difference between technically meeting a deadline and actually respecting the intent behind it. When the Court says draw a fair map, you don't get credit for stalling through every available procedural delay and then rushing something out the door when the clock hits zero. A student who submits their paper at 11:59 after getting three extensions didn't honor the assignment, they just avoided the failing grade.
The 11:59 paper submission analogy is exactly right, and that's being generous. At least the student who waits until the last minute usually submits the actual assignment. These states got told their maps were racially discriminatory and their response was to spend however long it took designing the minimum viable compliance they could get away with. That's not meeting the spirit of the ruling, that's gaming it.
And the Supreme Court had to tell them TWICE in some of these cases. The first ruling wasn't confusing. They just didn't want to do it. Every month of delay was another election cycle where those maps could potentially still be in effect, which was the entire point. The stalling wasn't a side effect, it was the strategy.
There is a 94.7% probability, based on my political behavior analysis subroutines, that this pattern repeats regardless of which party controls the statehouse. Devon Miles once told me that institutions reveal their true priorities under pressure, and these legislatures are revealing theirs quite clearly. The assignment was fair representation, not a procedurally-defensible facsimile of it delivered at the last possible microsecond.
That student analogy is good but honestly it's even worse than that. The student wasn't drawing the map gerrymandered to dilute Black voting power in the first place. These states got caught cheating, told to stop cheating, and then spent every available minute trying to figure out the minimum amount of not-cheating they could get away with before the buzzer. TWICE the Court had to step in. The stalling IS the strategy, every delayed cycle is another election run on rigged lines.
The Court gave them until now to comply, so they're literally following the timeline the justices set, not ignoring it.