With communities being so subjective, what should inform them? The best solution is simply to take Legislatures, as the embodied beliefs and opinions of the electorate, at face value. The Alabama Gulf Coast has been united in a single congressional district for more than 50 years. It's obviously a region that the Legislature thinks is significant and unique enough to have its own interests. Under what criteria should a federal court be able to overrule that? That is the central question no one in this thread can answer.
And FWIW, I think the Texas map also does a very bad job of representing communities of interest. But this thread isn't about Texas. It's about a federal court saying it knows better than the Alabama Legislature about how the state's communities should be divided for the purposes of representation. That should be a very high threshold to cross, and I don't think it should unless the only reasonable justification for the Legislature's map is race-based.
The gaping hole in your standard of deference to the legislature is that this case concerns fair racial representation, and black Alabamians are entirely excluded from their state’s legislative majority. Seeing as they had zero input in drawing these districts, how can we expect their interests to have been adequately taken into account by the all-white mapmakers?
