The Supreme Court cleared the way for Alabama officials to redraw their congressional map on Monday, weeks after striking down Louisiana’s second black-majority congressional district.
Alabama officials filed petitions to the Supreme Court last month urging the justices to quickly toss out a ruling that required the state to use a congressional map with two black-majority congressional districts. In a 6-3 ruling, the high court granted the state’s request to vacate the trio of rulings blocking it from adopting a new map, in light of the justices’ late April ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which significantly raised the legal bar for proving claims of intentional racial discrimination when drawing congressional maps.
The ruling by the Supreme Court will likely allow Republicans to flip one of the two Democratic-held congressional seats in the state for the 2026 election, as the state will revert to a 2023 map that still included one black-majority district. Lawmakers in Alabama passed legislation this week that would delay the state’s congressional primaries if state officials are permitted to use the 2023 map, rather than the current court-ordered map with two black-majority districts. The ruling also opens the door to allow lawmakers to redraw the map to maximize the chances of the GOP picking up another seat in the future.
The unsigned majority did not elaborate on their decision, other than telling the lower courts to consider the cases in light of the Callais decision. Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who wrote that the high court’s decision was “inappropriate and will cause only confusion as Alabamians begin to vote in the elections scheduled for next week.”
“The Court today unceremoniously discards the District Court’s meticulously documented and supported discriminatory-intent finding and careful remedial order without any sound basis for doing so and without regard for the confusion that will surely ensue,” Sotomayor wrote, while claiming the Callais decision does not change the lower court’s finding of racially discriminatory intent behind the 2023 map.
The Supreme Court’s ruling on Alabama’s redistricting effort comes as various GOP-led states, including Louisiana, Florida, and Tennessee, have rushed to redraw their congressional maps after the high court’s April 29 ruling in Callais rewrote the rules on what is needed to prove racial gerrymandering. The decision is expected to net Republicans several seats in the House in a year where control of the lower chamber of Congress will be hotly contested.
ALABAMA ASKS SUPREME COURT TO ALLOW FOR REDRAWN CONGRESSIONAL MAP
Democrats have attempted to counter Republicans’ mid-decade redistricting push in states such as California and Virginia, but faced a major setback on Friday when the Virginia Supreme Court found state Democrats illegally rushed a redistricting referendum to voters last month.
Virginia Democrats filed a long-shot emergency petition to the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday urging the justices to allow the gerrymander, which would net them up to four House seats.