Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama (13-895)

argument 13-895

Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama

Supreme Court of the United States 1h 9m 5 speakers 8 chapters transcribed 6 days ago official recording ↗

▲ 0

Transcript

jump: chapters · speakers · find in transcript

Transcript

Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

What is the central dispute in the Alabama Legislative Black Caucus v. Alabama case?

John G. Roberts 0:01

We'll hear an argument in case number 13-895, Alabama Legislative Black Caucus versus Alabama, and case 13-1138, the Alabama Democratic Conference versus Alabama. Mr.

Richard Pildes 0:14

Pildes? Mr. Chief Justice, it may please the Court. Alabama employed rigid racial quotas racial targets to design all its black majority districts based on mere racial statistics alone, and then used only racial demographic data to meet those targets with astonishing precision. These targets were not based on any consideration of what's required under current conditions in Alabama, as Section 5 actually requires. Racial quotas in the context of districting are a dangerous business. They can be a way of giving minorities faced with racially polarized voting a fair opportunity to elect. But they can also be a way of unnecessarily packing voters by race in ways that further polarize and isolate us by race.

John G. Roberts 1:02

So you want, on the one hand, they obviously had to move new voters into the majority minority districts because they were all underpopulated. And they need to move enough so that the minorities have an opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. but they can't move too many because that would be packing. Correct?

Richard Pildes 1:21

MR. Your Honor, we understand that States are in a bind in this situation, as has been true under Title VII and under the Voting Rights Act under Section 2. MR.

John G. Roberts 1:30

So but they have to do that. They have to hit this sweet spot between those two extremes without taking race predominantly into consideration.

Richard Pildes 1:38

MR. They don't have to hit a sweet spot. This Court has marked out a legitimate path that States can take and must take to comply both with their Section 5 obligations and with their equal protection obligations, not to use the excessive and unjustified use of racial categories.

Samuel A. Alito 1:53

But the Section 5 obligation, gee, it used to require that there be no regression in majority black districts, so that if a district went from 69 percent black to 55 percent black, you would be in trouble.

Richard Pildes 2:12

Your Honor, Section 5 has always required no retrogression based on the ability to elect under current conditions. Right. So if there's no racially polarized voting

Samuel A. Alito 2:21

— And they're saying that's all we did. You know, these districts were underpopulated with respect to other ones, so we had to move new people in them. And — We had to do it in such a way that there was still the 69 percent black population that there used to be in order to avoid retrogression. Your Honor,

Richard Pildes 2:44

retrogression has never meant merely reproducing racial statistics purely for their own sake. It's meant preserving the ability to elect, preserving majority and minority.

Samuel A. Alito 2:54

Oh, you can say that, but it meant the only way to be sure you're not doing that is maintaining the same the same percentage. And that's certainly the way the Justice Department in the bad old days used to interpret it. It may be

Richard Pildes 3:09

in the first decade or so of the application of Section 5, DOJ employed various kinds of practices, as you described. As our brief documents in detail, the Department of Justice has routinely pre-cleared plans that reduce black populations as long as they don't reduce the ability to elect. And indeed, in Alabama, in the last round of redistricting, If you look at the blue brief of the Black Caucus at the chart at 8A, you will see that Alabama dramatically reduced black populations in all of its districts in the Senate and in virtually all of its districts in the House. And if you look at that chart, you will see numbers like a 12-point reduction, a 19-point reduction, a 10-point reduction, 16-point reduction.

John G. Roberts 3:54

They reduced

Richard Pildes 3:54

districts down to 56%.

John G. Roberts 3:57

Why is that? Why do you no longer need as high a percentage of minority voters to maintain a situation where minority voters can still elect their candidates of choice?

Richard Pildes 4:07

For the reasons that this Court adverted to in Shelby County and the reasons that Alabama rightly celebrates in its briefs. Black turnout and black registration rates in Alabama now routinely equal or even exceed white registration and white turnout rates.