Let me offer an explanation for the significance of the above, for anyone unaware
The Supreme Court's unanimous opinion in Gingles v. Thornburg established an important precedent governing the influence of the Voting Rights Act on redistricting.
The "Gingles Test" establishes when a minority district is required. It has three parts:
1. The minority group must be "sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district"
2. The minority group must vote as a bloc
3. The majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to defeat the minority's preferred candidate
When these three elements are present, then a district must exist that reliably elects the minority's candidate of choice. The court's judgement says that discriminatory intent and causation are both completely irrelevant here, only the test itself matters. If polarized voting exists and a Gingles district can exist for a minority community, then there must be a district that can reliably elect that community's preferred candidate.
Because it's obvious that racially polarized voting occurs in the Deep South, we only need to focus on the first part of the Gingles Test, the compactness test:
Is the specific minority community populous enough and geographically compact enough that its members can constitute a majority of a district's voting age population?
This is called the "compactness test" for a reason. The sprawling 11th District here was ruled unconstitutional because it was not at all compact and the African American population of the district was not part of any coherent community. People living in urban Dekalb County don't have the same interests and priorities as people in the rural black belt or downtown Savannah, even if they're both in the same racial minority. In most circumstances though the Courts have not been very strict about the definitions of "compactness" or "community".
If the General Assembly gets rid of Sanford Bishop's seat, the state's most likely case in the ensuing lawsuit will probably be to push for a new and stricter definition of minority community here. It will probably not be successful because existing precedent covers a much broader definition but it would be the only real argument they could make.
All things considered "African Americans in southwest Georgia" can be reasonably considered a discrete minority community. As you can see, I've drawn a compact district in the area of the current 2nd District with a 50.5% black voting age population. This means a district must exist that can be expected to elect their candidate of choice (who is currently Sanford Bishop). Keep in mind the district itself does not need to be >50% black! It can certainly be less, as long as it will probably still elect the black community's candidate of choice.
Even though it's not strictly necessary, traditionally when drawing VRA districts the mapmakers have typically drawn the districts themselves to be >50% minority, either because they had no pressing reason to do otherwise, or because they deemed it necessary to ensure the election of the minority's candidate of choice
Great introduction.
However, as you mentioned, how compact and what is a community is up to interpretation. 11th circuit is quite conservative and partisan, which may rule in R favor. And I am suspicious if SC will grant cert in this case.
