A New Era of Open Defiance
A series of southern states have ignored federal court rulings on voting rights.
When, earlier this year, Alabama simply refused to draw congressional maps that complied with a federal court order, the decision looked like an outlier—a disturbing one, but an outlier nonetheless. Now it’s starting to look more like an early warning. On Friday, the Georgia state legislature released maps that appear to defy a federal judge’s ruling. Meanwhile, legislators in Louisiana have had their deadline extended to fix congressional districts that also didn’t pass judicial review.
All three of these states have Republican-led legislatures (and once Louisiana’s new governor is sworn in, next month, it will have GOP executives, too), and all three cases involve
