Dana El-Kurd

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4,891 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 30 May

Dana El-Kurd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Behind the Bastards · It Could Happen Here Weekly 234 · 30 May 2026 podcast

But after that ruling, Alabama asked the Supreme Court again for a quick appeals decision before the state's scheduled primary and to put the lower court's order barring the use of the 2023 map on hold, considering their recent ruling in the Louisiana case.

And on May 11th, the Supreme Court granted Alabama's emergency shadow docket appeal, vacated the order blocking the use of the 2023 district map, and sent the case back to the lower court for further review in light of the Louisiana ruling.

So that's a lot.

But remember that the district court already ruled that the 2023 map intentionally discriminated based on race, the very requirement set by the Supreme Court's Louisiana ruling.

So when the district court reconsidered the case this past week, they found that the Louisiana decision only strengthened their original ruling that the Alabama GOP map was intentionally discriminatory and diluted black voters.

This is pretty much what Sotomayor wrote in her dissent when she argued that there was, quote unquote, no reason to send the case back to the district court because that court had already concluded that Alabama, quote, violated the 14th Amendment by intentionally diluting the votes of black voters in Alabama.

That constitutional finding of intentional discrimination is independent of and unaffected by any of the legal issues discussed in the Louisiana case, unquote.

So that's essentially what happened.

That's essentially what the district court found.

The three-judge panel also rebuffed opposition to the court-ordered map in Alabama on the basis that it bears a similarity to the map at the center of the Louisiana case, writing that it's their understanding of the Supreme Court's recent ruling that race as a districting criterion cannot be used when drawing maps—

But that quote-unquote relevant racial data may be considered for a lawful purpose, like checking that the drawn maps comply with Voting Rights Act precedent.

It's not that racial data is used in the drawing of maps, but after the maps are drawn, they can be checked against racial data to make sure they comply with Voting Rights Act law.

The district court wrote that Louisiana's Black population is not as concentrated as in Alabama, requiring a Black-majority district to slice through multiple metropolitan areas to scoop up Black voters, whereas in Alabama, it's quote-unquote relatively easy to draw a reasonably configured majority Black district.

"...we are unsurprised that race-blind relief is available here but was unavailable there.

Here it has been consistently obvious to us from our visual assessment of the geographic dispersion of Alabama's Black population and statistics about Black population centers in the state that Black voters in Alabama are relatively geographically compact."

So essentially, it's actually pretty difficult to draw a map that separates out the Black population to be a minority force in all voting districts.

As for demonstrating intent, the district court found that the Alabama legislature only enacted the discriminatory map after knowing it would dilute the impact of Black voters.

And by having prior knowledge of the disparate racial impact, including from federal court findings, and then passing them up anyway, that itself shows intent.

Furthermore, the judges wrote that the case's, quote, enormous record contains no evidence of a partisan motive, unquote, in the drawing of the 2023 map.

I'll quote again from the recent order, quote, in the simplest terms, the sequence and substance of extraordinary legislative events

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