Page:Allen v. Milligan.pdf/87

42 District 7 into an irregularly shaped supermajority-black district—one that scooped up populous clusters of black voters in the disparate urban centers of Birmingham and Montgomery to connect them across a swath of largely majority-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,. It did not occur to the court that the Constitution 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 Alabama carve up not two but three of its main urban centers on the basis of race, and that it configure those urban centers’ 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 reasonable 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 encourage a conception of politics as a struggle for power between “competing racial factions.” Shaw I, 509 U. S., at