Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito predicted earlier this year that Supreme Court rulings would be ignored by those charged with carrying them out. Taking political aim at the Biden administration, Alito cast aspersions on the executive branch’s willingness to abide by SCOTUS’s decisions when those decisions contradicted the administration’s political views.
In his controversial dissent on a case involving abortion pills, Alito wrote that “the Government has not dispelled legitimate doubts that it would even obey an unfavorable order in these cases, much less that it would choose to take enforcement actions to which it has strong objections.”
Justice Alito's assertion that the Biden administration would not follow a legitimate order from the Court is unwarranted & completely unbefitting a Supreme Court justice. pic.twitter.com/QyzILH2t8j
— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) April 21, 2023
As it turns out, Alito was correct in predicting that governmental bodies were prepared to flout Supreme Court rulings and proceed in autonomous fashion — i.e., not “obey an unfavorable order in these cases,” as Alito wrote.
What Alito failed to accurately predict was the identity of the SCOTUS scofflaws. This week it’s the GOP-led Alabama legislature that appears to be defying the Supreme Court — on voting rights.
“Outright defiance of the Supreme Court’s order,” is how Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, described Alabama’s newly redrawn district maps to CNN’s Dana Bash. (Nelson is referring to how Alabama has redrawn its congressional maps in a way that appears to flout the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Allen v. Milligan.)
The SCOTUS decision directed Alabama to create two majority-Black districts or “something quite close to it” instead of one, a change that would acknowledge that the Black population of Alabama is at 27%.
The victorious plaintiffs in Allen v. Milligan released a statement that said: “The Alabama Legislature believes it is above the law. What we are dealing with is a group of lawmakers who are blatantly disregarding not just the Voting Rights Act, but a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court and a court order from the three-judge district court.”
[NOTE: In 2021 Alabama Governor Kay Ivey had signed into law a congressional map with redrawn boundaries for the state’s seven districts that left the state with a single majority-Black district despite the population percentage growth.]
