MONTGOMERY — Attorney General Steve Marshall has filed a response to plaintiffs in the congressional redistricting lawsuit asking the district court to deny their request against enforcing the state’s recently adopted congressional map.

The plaintiffs in the Merrill v. Milligan case — consisting of a group of voters and the Alabama NAACP — said when legislators approved a revised map in July, they didn’t comply with the June 2023 Supreme Court ruling affirming a lower court’s decision against the state’s 2021 map.

The Courts ordered the state to redraw the map so that it does not violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which in part states Section 2 is violated when “it is shown that the political processes leading to nomination or election in the State or political subdivision are not equally open to participation by members of a class of citizens.”

The state was tasked with redrawing the map with a second congressional district where Black voters have an opportunity to elect their preferred candidates. Currently, only one of the Alabama’s seven U.S. House of Representatives districts, District 7, is majority Black, despite Black people making up 27 percent of the state’s population.

Alabama lawmakers, along party lines, approved a map (SB 5) in July that keeps one congressional district with 50 percent Black population and adds one with 40 percent Black population. The proposed map largely affects districts in the southern parts of the state.

In a response to plaintiffs’ objections to the revised Republican-approved map, Marshall said plaintiffs have not shown that the 2023 plan likely violates Section 2 and have not shown that the 2023 plan fails to remedy the repealed plan’s likely violation.

The response argues the 2023 Legislature opted “to more fully and fairly apply traditional principles” blessed by the Allen Court to address the purportedly discriminatory cracking of “the Black Belt,” or the areas along the south central part of the state.

“This Court had ‘found that HB1 cracks majority-Black communities of interest’ in the Black Belt and Montgomery in a way that resulted in discrimination on account of race, and the 2023 Legislature remedied that discrimination by applying its traditional principles as fairly to those communities as to the Gulf and the Wiregrass,” Marshall said in the response. “Unless there is some way to create an additional majority-Black district without violating these ‘traditional redistricting principles,’ Section 2 is satisfied, and the past likely violation is remedied.”

Plaintiffs argue that the 2023 map fails to comply with Section 2 of the voting rights act by failing to create two majority-black districts or something close to it that closely balances the 27 percent Black population in the state.

In the 2021 plan, the Black Belt was split into four congressional districts as it had in past plans.

Cracking of the Back Belt region of Alabama was among top arguments in the plaintiff’s 2021 lawsuit and plaintiffs had suggested splitting the Black Belt into as few districts as possible. Marshall argues that the argument has been mediated in the new 2023 map.

“Departing from past redistricting plans, the 2023 Plan puts all 18 counties that make up the Black Belt entirely within Districts 2 and 7,” Marshall explained in his 73-page response. “Montgomery is kept whole in District 2, and unlike in Plaintiffs’ new remedial map, not a single Black Belt county — core or otherwise — is split between two districts. Of the additional five counties that are “sometimes” added to the definition of the Black Belt, four are kept whole in District 7. Only the fifth, Escambia County, is in District 1, as necessary for contiguity and population equality.”

Much of Marshall’s arguments stem on race being used as a sole basis for determining districts and communities of interests, or a group of people who share common interest and goals. He said neither the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama-Souther Division, nor the U.S. Supreme Court has ever said that Section 2 requires the State to subordinate “nonracial communities of interest.”

He said assigning voters on the basis of race is unconstitutional and creates the “offensive and demeaning assumption that voters of a particular race, because of their race, ‘think alike, share the same political interests, and will prefer the same candidates at the polls.’”

Historic, cultural and regional features, not just race, can be used to determine communities of interest for redistricting, Marshall asserted.

“Splitting communities of interest because they are too white unambiguously violates the Constitution,” Marshall’s response states.

A federal court hearing in the case is scheduled for Aug. 14 at the Hugo L. Black U.S. Courthouse in Birmingham. Three judges will determine whether the map will move forward for elections next year.

Groups in Georgia and other states have been hopeful that the Supreme Court’s ruling against the Alabama map adopted in 2021 will pave a way for new maps to be redrawn in their respective states; A hearing has been set Sept. 5 in Georgia to allow three lawsuits against Georgia House, Senate and congressional maps adopted by state lawmakers in 2021 to be heard in a coordinated trial.