This is a column.

In the middle of Alabama’s fraught congressional redistricting, a political consultant deeply involved in the process sent Alabama Sen. Steve Livingston, R-Scottsboro, a text message asking if they could meet.

“Coming through?” the consultant, Chris Brown, who lives in Jefferson County, asked in 2023. “I’m clear the rest of the day.”

Livingston, who co-chaired the state’s redistricting committee and was in the state capital, replied with three words.

“Still monkey town.”

Earlier this month, a panel of three federal judges — two of them appointed by President Donald Trump — published an order that, if bound between two covers, would be a book. At 552 pages, the latest installment of the Allen v. Milligan case, seeks to answer a question.

Is Alabama’s government intentionally racist, or maybe racist by accident?

In the 2021 lawsuit over Alabama’s congressional maps, a group of Black voters argued that Livingston’s text message was yet another sign pointing to an obvious answer. An Alabama historian testified that the term is a racially derogatory nickname for Montgomery.

On the other hand, one Black Alabama state lawmaker, Sen. Bobby Singleton, D-Greensboro, testified that he didn’t take it that way in the context.

The judges didn’t seem convinced of its harmlessness and cited it several times in their new 552-page tome.

(I called Livingston to ask what he meant by the term, but I haven’t heard back.)

Regardless, the federal judges seem to have found an answer to the bigger question, for which Livingston’s text was another grain of sand on top of a greater mountain of evidence.

“As we explain below, despite our searching review of all the evidence before us — much of it directly from the Legislators and Legislature, none of it in dispute — try as we might, we cannot understand the 2023 Plan as anything other than an intentional effort to dilute Black Alabamians’ voting strength and evade the unambiguous requirements of court orders standing in the way,” the judges wrote this month.

In other words, it doesn’t matter what Livingston meant by “monkey town,” so much as what Livingston and other lawmakers did with their map. Their discrimination against Black Alabamians has been clear, unambiguous and intentional.

Alabama’s state government is intentionally racist, the judges concluded.

The court makes clear in its ruling that it considered every other interpretation of the facts, every argument to the contrary. In the end, they found that the Alabama Legislature isn’t only racist, but stubborn, too.

It’s just the latest chapter in a long-running saga, one where Alabama keeps losing at most every turn. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a previous finding from the same three judges and told Alabama to draw a second congressional district where Black voters could have a voice. But the Alabama Legislature refused. Arguing that it was impossible to meet the court’s criteria, the state tried to take the case back to the high court again. That attempt failed and the lower court had to draw the state’s map itself.

And still — after an election in that new district put Democrat Shomari Figures in Congress — the Alabama Attorney General’s office kept fighting. After losing so badly that the state had to pay $5.25 million to reimburse the legal fees of the voters who sued, Alabama went back for more.

But the court seems to have had enough and appears to be considering something further — putting Alabama back under the sort of federal supervision the state escaped after the Shelby v. Holder case set it free in 2018.

“The 2020 redistricting cycle in Alabama — the first cycle in 50 years that Alabama has been free of the strictures of federal preclearance — did not have to turn out this way,” the judges wrote. “We wish it had not, but we have eyes to see the veritable mountain of evidence that it did.”

In other words, Alabama blew the chance to show it wasn’t racist.

“[T]he Legislature may subject itself to a finding that it has enacted a map for the purpose of discriminating against minority voters by diluting their voting strength,” the judges wrote “After an exhaustive review of all the evidence, we have made just that finding.”

The voters who sued have asked for federal oversight of Alabama elections. The federal judges in this case seem poised to give it to them.

And putting Sen. Livingston’s monkey business at an end.