A Southern man don’t need them around, anyhow Ala-by God-bama! “In an echo of mid-century southern defiance of school desegregation, the Yellowhammer State’s Republican-controlled legislature defied the conservative-dominated Court’s directive to redraw its congressional map with an additional Black-majority district,” Adam Serwer explains in The Atlantic: Openly defying a Supreme Court order is rare—almost as rare as conservative justices recognizing that the Fifteenth Amendment outlaws racial discrimination in voting. Under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, states are sometimes required to draw districts with majority-minority populations. This requirement exists because after Reconstruction, one of the methods southern states used to disenfranchise their Black populations was racially gerrymandering congressional districts so that Black voters could not affect the outcome of congressional elections. Earlier this year, Alabama asked the Supreme Court to further weaken the Voting Rights Act so as to preserve its racial gerrymander. More than a quarter of Alabama’s population is Black, but the state’s Republican majority has racially gerrymandered that population into a single district out of seven because it fears those voters might elect Democrats. The partisan motive is no excuse for racial discrimination—1870s Democrats also had a partisan interest in disenfranchising Black voters, who were then reliably Republican. After failing to get the Supreme Court to overturn Section 2, Alabama decided that following the law was optional. Hell, yeah! Even as the right criticizes Democrats’ calls for ethics rules for the court in light of conservative justices’ non-transparency about gifts from ultra-rich supporters, Alabama reserves the right to ignore court rulings it dislikes. Democrats’ complaints only further deligitimize…