The Supreme Court issued an unsigned order on Tuesday allowing Alabama to implement a new congressional map for this year’s midterm elections. The decision permits the state to eliminate one of two House districts currently represented by a Black Democrat, a move expected to benefit Republicans in the upcoming November elections.
The three liberal justices on the bench dissented from the decision, which was handled through the court’s emergency docket. This ruling comes amid a wave of mid-decade redistricting across the country, with the Supreme Court recently weighing in on congressional maps in Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, California, and Alabama. The majority of these interventions have resulted in advantages for the Republican Party.
The order follows a major 6-3 Supreme Court decision on April 29 that significantly altered the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That ruling raised the legal threshold for challenging maps, requiring voting rights groups to demonstrate a “strong inference” of intentional racial discrimination before a lawsuit can move forward. Following that decision, several Southern states, including Florida and Tennessee, moved to redraw their districts in ways that favor Republicans.
The legal battle over Alabama’s map has a complex history. In 2023, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that required Alabama to create a second majority-Black district, finding the original map likely violated the Voting Rights Act. As a result, the 2024 elections were held under a court-drawn map, leading to the election of two Black Democratic representatives out of the state’s seven congressional seats.
However, following the Supreme Court’s April ruling, Alabama officials petitioned the high court in May to throw out the court-ordered map in time for the upcoming midterms. The conservative majority granted that request on May 11.
In her dissent at the time, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the decision “unceremoniously discards” the lower court’s findings of intentional discrimination “without regard for the confusion that will surely ensue.”
Despite that intervention, a special three-judge panel in Alabama unanimously rejected the state’s newly drawn map last week. The lower court ruled that the map still likely violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause as well as the Voting Rights Act, even under the Supreme Court’s stricter new standards. Tuesday’s Supreme Court order blocks that lower court ruling.
Although Alabama already conducted its primary elections in May, Republican Governor Kay Ivey previously signed legislation authorizing special elections in August for the reshaped districts, clearing the way for the new map to be used this November.
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