The Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Monday handed Alabama officials a major win in their effort to redraw the state’s congressional map in favor of Republicans in light of the court’s decision last month to weaken the Voting Rights Act. Monday’s ruling could deliver an additional seat to the GOP in the midterm elections.
In an unsigned opinion, the justices vacated a lower court’s finding that a 2023 redistricting map had diluted the political power of the state’s Black voters. The Monday order sent the case back to the lower court for consideration under the Supreme Court’s ideologically split April decision on the Voting Rights Act.
The majority did not explain its reasoning.
The ruling is the latest to help Republicans redraw congressional maps in the wake of the high court’s landmark decision, which set new standards for considering race under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. It is an apparent reversal from prior instances in which the court found Alabama’s maps to be unlawful.
The court’s three liberal justices dissented from Monday’s decision.
“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,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Vacating the lower court order “is thus inappropriate and will cause only confusion as Alabamians begin to vote in the elections scheduled for next week,” Sotomayor added.
Most political analysts on both sides expect Democrats to pick up enough seats to capture control of the House in November. But efforts by Alabama Republicans, along with others in the South, to redistrict congressional boundary lines in the wake of the April ruling could change the dynamics of the upcoming races.
Shortly after that ruling, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) suspended this month’s House primary elections so state lawmakers could pass a new congressional map. The high court then agreed to expedite the transmission of its opinion to the lower courts so that Louisiana could more rapidly redraw its maps.
Alabama’s congressional delegation consists of five White Republicans and two Black Democrats, and GOP leaders hope to redraw electoral boundaries to eliminate one or both Democratic seats. But Alabama has been operating under an unusual injunction barring it from redrawing its map before 2030 — the injunction the Supreme Court effectively lifted on Monday.
In anticipation of the Supreme Court’s action, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) had ordered a special legislative session to consider changes to electoral boundaries as well as new primary dates.
The decision in the Alabama case is another twist in the long-running litigation over the state’s congressional and legislative maps. In June 2023, the high court, in a surprise 5-4 decision, found that the legislature had drawn congressional maps that unlawfully diluted the voting power of the state’s Black residents. The decision affirmed a lower-court ruling that the state must draw a second district to give Black Alabamans greater opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice.
Months later, the Supreme Court rejected a revised Alabama map that failed to include that second district. A panel of federal judges then directed a special master and cartographer to draw a map that included a second district with a large share of Black voters.
The creation of that second majority-minority district led to the election of Rep. Shomari Figures, a Black Democrat.
Republicans hold a historically narrow 217-212 advantage in the U.S. House, with one independent and five vacancies. Democrats hope to recapture the chamber’s majority in November, and the two parties have engaged in a tit-for-tat frenzy in recent months to draw more favorable districts in states where they hold power.
“We’re deeply disappointed by the Supreme Court’s decision,” said Deuel Ross, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which fought Alabama’s 2023 restricting plan. “It allows Alabama to reinstate an intentionally discriminatory map in the middle of the ongoing primary elections.”
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