Alabama Is Defying the Supreme Court on Voting Rights

Supreme Court rulings are meant to be the law of the land, but Alabama is taking its recent opinion on the Voting Rights Act as a mere recommendation. 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.

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...