The federal court overseeing the Alabama’s congressional redistricting case Tuesday rejected a request from a group led by Joe Reed, a longtime power broker in the Alabama Democratic Party, to intervene. 

The Alabama Democratic Conference, a mostly-Black organization, filed a motion to intervene in Allen v. Milligan on July 10. Attorneys for the group wrote that they would have no other opportunity to present their views on the remedial process to the court.

“Here, denial of intervention would preclude the ADC from having the opportunity to present its plan to the Court and to explain why neither the Legislature’s plan (if it enacts one) nor the plaintiffs’ plans are acceptable,” wrote the attorneys for the ADC in the July 10 filing.

Both plaintiffs in the case and the state opposed the ADC motion, U.S. Circuit Judge Stanley Marcus and U.S. district judges Anna Manasco and Terry Moorer wrote in a signed opinion Tuesday. The judges wrote that the Alabama Democratic Conference’s attempt to intervene was not timely, noting that arguments in the case at the lower court level took place in January 2022, nearly 19 months ago.

“Although the ADC’s interests could have been affected during that stage of these proceedings, the ADC did not then seek to intervene,” wrote the three judges in the filing. “This litigation is now nearly two years old and is in a critical, time-sensitive stage.”

The court also said that ADC’s intervention could open the “floodgates” of people wanting to intervene with their own solutions, and the ADC’s intervention would prejudice current parties through potential delays.

Reed presented redistricting plans to legislative committees overseeing the creation of new maps during the Alabama Legislature’s special session last week. Reed’s proposal would have created two majority-Black districts in the state, an approach that Democrats say is the only way to address the Voting Rights Act violations the court found. 

But both Democrats and Republicans rejected Reed’s proposal, saying that it split too many counties and precincts. The Republican majority in the Legislature, rejecting other Democratic plans for two majority-Black districts, approved a map on Friday that created one majority-Black congressional district and one with 40% Black population. 

A hearing on the maps is scheduled for August 14.