Dirty Boots: Mulling Over “Milligan”
Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.
An equitable and viable electoral map seems to me like an essential aspect of democracy, since those district lines determine who is grouped with whom to form a constituency. If that didn’t matter, I doubt if people would fight about it. But they do fight about it – quite a bit lately – and recent news stories have prompted me to pay closer attention to what is going on.
Struggles over voting maps have been flaring up all over the South since the Shelby v. Holder ruling in 2013. Aside from the one in Alabama, where I live, legal battles have also been brewing and boiling over in South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi with varied outcomes. In late October, the State of Georgia found out that they will have to redraw their map. I follow these cases as best as I can, because I want the outcomes of our elections to yield elected officials who bring diverse perspectives to the bargaining table. Most historians agree that, other than a tenuous level of biracial cooperation in the 1970s and ’80s, the South has never enjoyed a kind of governance that does its best to address all people’s needs. I’d like to see that happen, though there are few signs that it ever will.
In Alabama, for example, our seven House districts have six white representatives and one black representative in the House. Notwithstanding the fact that our two US senators have always been white and male, this six-to-one ratio means that 14% of our House delegation has been black (and female). Yet, during the same span of recent years, Alabama’s black population has been roughly double that. According to current estimates from the US Census Bureau, of Alabama’s five million residents, almost 69% are white, 27% are black, and 5% are Hispanic/Latino, with remaining racial groups measuring in scant proportions. In 2021, after the decennial census, there could have been meaningful change to address that disproportion, when Alabama’s legislature had the opportunity to draw a reapportioned map. But their redrawn map yielded more of the same. This missed opportunity led Evan Milligan and the other plaintiffs to draw up a lawsuit that opposed the legislature’s new map, because it did not significantly alter the districts.
The Milligan case then made its way through the courts. According to a “Case Summary” from the American Redistricting Project:
On January 24, 2022, the [lower] court issued an opinion granting in part the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction on the grounds the plaintiffs are “substantially likely” to establish the existence of a Section 2 violation in Alabama’s congressional redistricting plan. The court found that Black Alabamians are sufficiently numerous and sufficiently geographically compact to constitute a voting-age majority in a second congressional district, voting in the challenged districts is intensely racially polarized, and under the totality of circumstances, Black voters have less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice. The court ordered the state legislature to pass a remedial redistricting plan within 14 days which contained either a second majority-Black congressional district or a second district in which Black Alabamians have the opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice, and included a contingency that the court would appoint a special master to draw a plan in the event the state failed to do so. Shortly thereafter, the defendants appealed the decision to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals and sought an emergency stay pending appeal from the U.S. Supreme Court.
Nearly two years later, the October 5, 2023 headline from National Public Radio stated it cleanly and clearly: “Alabama finally has a new congressional map after a lengthy fight.” The ruling from a three-judge panel meant that the months-old US Supreme Court ruling in the Milligan case was being enforced. This episode in our state’s history fits squarely within a long tradition of recalcitrance, which usually manifests as political or legal efforts that lack a viable rationale related to the good governance of all people. Reading just the opening “Syllabus” section of last summer’s Milligan ruling from the high court, one will find instance after instance of the justices disagreeing with Alabama’s legal arguments for proceeding with the legislative super-majority’s original 2021 map, the State’s preferred option.
It is important to note that this episode in our modern history didn’t arise out of nowhere. The situation that led us to the lawsuit emerged in the 1990s when black Democrats partnered with the then-minority Republicans to create the existing black-majority for District 7. In Southern Politics in the 1990s, historian and editor Alexander P. Lamis explains how post-Civil Rights black Democrats did not like the way that Alabama’s coalition-based and white-dominated Democratic Party of the 1980s spread out black voters into multiple districts as a reliable base for Democratic candidates. The Democratic coalition of the 1970s and ’80s in the South contained a fragile mixture of blacks, working-class whites in labor unions, and liberal whites. This arrangement often left black voters frustrated, because it held a winning formula for moderate white candidates who received black votes but rarely (or never) for black candidates who did not receive white votes. So, in the ’90s, black Democrats worked across the aisle with the small but growing number of white Republicans to create a black-majority in District 7. (This reapportioned map was made necessary, in part, by population growth during the Sunbelt era.) Lamis’s book explains that one side effect of the black Democrats’ political maneuver was to aid in the Republicans’ ascent by reducing Democrats’ vote totals in other districts. Since the 1990s, the vastly white Republican Party has grown to hold a super-majority that now includes every statewide office, and they have used that power to push all Democrats – black and white – to the fringes of state politics.
We hear, with respect to the issues addressed in Milligan, how black voters in Alabama want to be able to elect “the candidate of their choice,” but the issue of representation does not only apply to race. Last month, Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen was on PBS NewsHour discussing the Our Common Purpose report and reminded viewers that, today, each House member represents 700,000 to 750,000 people [1]. Given the party affiliation and stated ideologies of our recent representatives, my voice has not been heard in the US House in years. As an independent, my political concerns cross the boundaries of party affiliation: federal debt reduction, improved public education, increased voter participation, addressing over-incarceration, and fairness in student loan repayment. My most recent representatives in the House have only favored the first of those five, but I have disagreed with their ideas on how to do it. They have wanted to cut public-assistance programs for low-income families, and I know that would be disastrous for many people in Alabama. I’m looking forward to seeing who we might elect instead in our newly drawn District 2.
Like many Americans, I’m exhausted with partisan politics. Because of that, I favor having states-based nonpartisan commissions to draw all of the maps for any kind of districting: congress, state legislatures, county commissions, city councils, all of them. It is not reasonable to expect a group of elected officials to create fair and equitable maps when it could mean disempowering themselves and conceding power to an opposing party. Most aspects and processes in American politics require garnering a majority to achieve a policy goal. So, we need people with no skin in the game to draw the maps. Then, elected officials would be more inclined to work together on behalf of their constituents, rather than arranging manufactured majorities in legislative bodies to achieve pre-defined agendas. Good government for all people should be the goal, and the way I see it: that may be a greater goal than party politics can ever achieve.
[1] From Allen’s interview: About a hundred years ago when Congress set the House’s current size at 435, each member had about 30,000 constituents. Today, given the rate of population growth since the 1920s, that number is much, much higher.
Foster Dickson 