Alabama Republican officers straight flouted a Supreme Courtroom choice placing down a redistricting map that didn’t adjust to the Voting Rights Act. Republican Gov. Kay Ivey all however admitted that state officers have been defying the courtroom when the Legislature produced a brand new map that didn’t create a second district the place Black voters may elect their most well-liked candidate, because the courtroom had ordered. That defiance appears to have been supposed to kick the difficulty again to the Supreme Courtroom in hopes of a special consequence.
A new report signifies that the driving power behind this marketing campaign of defiance is probably going Leonard Leo, the billionaire Catholic fundamentalist who has reshaped the Supreme Courtroom via his huge dark-money community and the group he co-chairs, The Federalist Society. The Alabama Political Reporter reported in July about “intelligence” from D.C. insiders working with state Republicans that Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was the swing majority vote on the preliminary ruling, was open to rehearing the case and reconsidering one of many final remaining protections of the Voting Rights Act.
Final week, the state requested the Supreme Courtroom to intervene once more. The emergency submitting zeroed in on Kavanaugh, apparently meaning to persuade him to flip his vote of their favor. The state’s legal professionals “name-checked [Kavanaugh] 10 occasions,” MSNBC reported, repeatedly quoting this line from his concurrence within the unique order: “the authority to conduct race-based redistricting can’t prolong indefinitely into the longer term.” The state’s submitting additionally tied this voting rights challenge to the courtroom’s affirmative motion reversal, stating that the courtroom’s holding in that case, specifically that “‘race-based’ affirmative motion in training ‘in some unspecified time in the future’ needed to ‘finish,’” recommended it additionally should finish in “districting.”
In line with the Alabama Political Reporter, these D.C. insiders who allegedly reported Kavanaugh’s openness to rehearing the difficulty look like tied to “D.C.-area regulation agency Consovoy McCarthy, the agency based by William Consovoy, a now-deceased former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas.” Consovoy McCarthy has deep ties to Leo and his community.
A evaluation of Alabama’s July Legislative Contract Overview Agenda reveals that the Alabama Lawyer Normal’s Workplace retained Consovoy McCarthy attorneys to “present knowledgeable evaluation, strategic recommendation, help in authorized analysis, and evaluation and revise pleadings as wanted” relating to an unnamed matter. Consovoy McCarthy has dealt with many high-profile circumstances assailing measures to redress racial discrimination on behalf of right-wing teams tied to Leo. As an illustration, Consovoy McCarthy has repeatedly represented the Sincere Elections Venture, an alias for The 85 Fund, a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) group carefully tied to Leo, and it represented the Leo-connected darkish cash group College students for Honest Admissions in its profitable problem to Harvard’s affirmative motion program on the Supreme Courtroom.
The ties between Leo’s bigger community, this regulation agency, and Kavanaugh are many and different, together with Alabama Solicitor Normal Edmund LaCour, the “lawyer assigned to work with Consovoy McCarthy,” in accordance with the outlet. LaCour is a Federalist Society member and former Donald Trump judicial nominee. LaCour’s spouse, Alice LaCour, can be a Federalist Society member who served on the affirmation committees for each Kavanaugh and fellow conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch.
None of this proves that Kavanaugh is concerned within the effort to permit Alabama’s racist gerrymander and successfully intestine the Voting Rights Act; that’s resting on that supposed “intelligence” that Alabama Political Reporter sources assert. What is obvious is that strands of Leo’s net of darkish cash are at work right here, with the purpose of eradicating the scraps of the VRA that also exist. There’s no denying that Kavanaugh owes his lifetime appointment on the courtroom to that community.
Alabama joined forces with Leo’s group to file this as an emergency petition, one which’s selected the shadow docket. They need the Supreme Courtroom to explode the VRA behind closed doorways—once more.
Signal the petition: Stand in opposition to unchecked energy within the Supreme Courtroom
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