Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-1086_1co6.pdf
Page Number: 87.0

42 

ALLEN v. MILLIGAN 

THOMAS, J., dissenting 

District  7  into  an  irregularly  shaped  supermajority-black 
district—one that scooped up populous clusters of black vot-
ers  in  the  disparate  urban  centers  of  Birmingham  and 
Montgomery to connect them across a swath of largely ma-
jority-black rural areas—without even “decid[ing] whether 
the creation  of  a majority  African-American district  [was] 
mandated  by  either  §2 or the  Constitution.”   Id.,  at  1499; 
see n. 7, supra.  It did not occur to the court that the Con-
stitution might forbid such an extreme racial gerrymander, 
as it quite obviously did.  But, once District 7 had come into 
being as a racial gerrymander thought necessary to satisfy 
§2,  it  became  an  all-but-immovable  fixture  of  Alabama’s 
districting scheme. 
  Now, 30 years later, the plaintiffs here demand that Ala-
bama carve up not two but three of its main urban centers 
on the basis of race, and that it configure those urban cen-
ters’ black neighborhoods with the outlying majority-black 
rural areas so that black voters can control not one but two 
of  the  State’s  seven  districts.    The  Federal  Judiciary  now 
upholds  their  demand—overriding  the  State’s  undoubted 
interest  in  preserving  the  core  of  its  existing  districts,  its 
plainly reasonable desire to maintain the Gulf Coast region 
as  a cohesive political unit,  and  its  persuasive  arguments 
that  a  race-neutral  districting  process  would  not  produce 
anything like the districts the plaintiffs seek.  Our reasons 
for doing so boil down to these: that the plaintiffs’ proposed 
districts  are  more  or  less within  the  vast  universe  of  rea-
sonable districting outcomes; that Alabama’s white voters 
do  not  support  the  black  minority’s  preferred  candidates; 
that  Alabama’s  racial  climate,  taken  as  a  rarefied  whole, 
crosses  some  indefinable  line  justifying  our  interference; 
and, last but certainly not least, that black Alabamians are 
about two-sevenths of the State’s overall population. 
  By applying §2 in this way to claims of this kind, we en-
courage a conception of politics as a struggle for power be-
tween  “competing  racial  factions.”    Shaw  I,  509  U. S.,  at