Its not hyperpartisan to argue against a split of the Mobile area.. Its literally D partisan hackishness to demand the split of region so they can get another congressional seat in Alabama. There is 0 chance for it in the current Alabama district courts/11th circuit/SCOTUS . And so far recent court precedence at SCOTUS has taken more of a liking for actual communities when forming VRA districts which is why VA03 and NC12 were cancelled.
It's absolutely hyper-partisan to argue that a seven seat Alabama map where you can easily create two Majority-Minority districts with over 50% AA CVAP should only have one majority-minority district b/c you think it would likely lead to Republicans losing a seat. NC-12 and VA-3 were drawn as racial gerrymanders designed to dilute minority representation. For example, VA-3 being canceled led to two AA districts in VA. IIRC, NC-12 was also scrapped b/c it was designed as a racial gerrymander to dilute minority representation (if memory serves, there were even e-mails from a GOP redistricting operative indicating this was the case in NC, but I could be mistaken).
There's no real argument against drawing two majority-minority seats if Alabama keeps its 7th district other than "racial gerrymanders are okay as long as it helps the Republican Party politically." I mean, if you think the Justices on the pertinent Courts are so partisan that they'll subscribe to that view then fair enough, I suppose. But let's not pretend this is about anything other than Republican partisanship.
NC12/VA03 aren't 2010 Racial Gerrymanders. They are leftovers/vestiges from Bush/Barr 1990 lawsuits working with Southern black Democrats to increase Black and Republican representation within the South by streching the VRA.. NC Democrats drew the same NC 12 in 2002 to 2010 and the 1990s. The GOP drew NC 12 like that because it was precedent, there isn't any need to put part of a sink with the Greensboro area because the surrounding area has always been very Republican. VA03 did give the GOP a definite partisan advantage however. Either way with SCOTUS cancelling districts that connected Charlotte and Greensboro or Richmond and the Hampton Roads they certainly aren't going to start demanding the Mobile area be split. The same goes in Louisiana, a 2nd VRA district is also very unlikely there. Instead expect a fair map in Louisiana that focuses on a Lean to Likely R district based in Baton Rouge.
Ironically the old NC Map would have been better for NC Democrats in 2018 with them certainly flipping NC09 and probably flipping NC02 as both of them voted for Biden !.
Your entire argument fails to acknowledge one of the most important facets to this entire process: demographic change. Simply put, the racial makeup of regions change over time. What worked in the 90s and 00s became unworkable in the 2010s.
Lets look at NC-12. When that seat was drawn in the 2000s, the seat was drawn as a minority-opportunity seat with a white plurality. By the end of the decade, the seat had become plurality black, and population growth meant that you could easily just nestle a seat in Charlotte that would check off the same boxes as the previous incarnation. Instead, the GOP maintained the configuration and used it to sink minority voters in towns that the previous seat had never even wrapped towards. We already know what their intention was, and the courts agreed that such a map was used to dilute the minority vote.
The story is almost the exact same for VA-03. In the 90s, it was drawn that way to give African Americans a seat in the state. By the 2010s, this seat had become so bloated with African American voters that it actively hurt them to keep the seat as one whole. The GOP kept it as a whole seat for the purposes of racial gerrymandering, even when the census data pointed towards two seats being optimal for VRA purposes. The courts agreed and struck it down in 2016.
Getting this back to AL, demographic change is impacting the state as well. While the black belt has been depopulating, Birmingham has seen a substantial increase in its AA population, to the point that the current configuration redrawn just to accommodate for population would see African Americans crammed in a seat reaching around 70%. This is in a state where, according to the 2018 census numbers, it'd be rather simple to draw two AA seats where both would be majority AA and by a strong margin just by taking in precincts from Mobile. Multiple folks in this thread have already drawn excellent maps that accomplish this goal.
The argument for having two seats is rather strong, and in all honesty it is very hyperpartisan to argue that splitting the city (which is extremely common across the nation for VRA purposes, see Tallahassee, Birmingham, Montgomery, Columbus GA, etc) is somehow a huge taboo and that African Americans should effectively just be crammed into one seat where they can pretty cleanly get two.
