It’s game on again in Alabama for a new congressional map after a Supreme Court intervention. This time, the state didn’t pass a brand-new map, but instead reinstated the map they designed after the 2020 census and reapportionment. That matters for the sequence of events that took place in federal courts this week, including last night at the Supreme Court.
The upshot of this per curiam 6-3 decision will be that Republicans will likely pick up a seat in the midterms. The impact will be felt more broadly as the Callais decision gets fleshed out in similar cases:
The Supreme Court on Tuesday cleared the way for Alabama to use a congressional map that is more favorable to Republicans in this year’s midterm elections, despite a lower court finding that the plan intentionally discriminated against Black voters.
In a divided 6-3 decision, the high court agreed to freeze the district court decision that prevented the state from using the map drawn by Republicans in 2023, which included one majority-Black congressional district out of Alabama’s seven. The lower court had found that Alabama intentionally discriminated against Black voters when it crafted those House district lines three years ago.
The lower court judges instead ordered the state to keep using a court-selected congressional map, which was in place for the 2024 elections, that includes two districts where Black voters have the opportunity to elect their preferred candidates. Under that map, the state’s seven-member congressional delegation is divided between five Republicans and two Democrats.
This fight started three years ago, rather than this year, apart from the mid-cycle redistricting seen in Texas, Florida, and California. A federal court redrew the map in 2023 after the state legislature’s map got thrown out over a challenge under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). That map created an absurd district that snaked across the entire state to create a new majority-minority district:
The three-judge panel for the U.S. district court in Alabama ordered the state to use the new lines in the 2024 elections. The judges stepped in to oversee the drawing of a new map after ruling last month that Alabama lawmakers flouted their instruction to fix a Voting Rights Act violation and create a second majority-Black district or something “quite close to it.”
The three-judge panel selected one of three plans proposed by a court-appointed expert that alters the bounds of Congressional District 2, now represented by Republican Rep. Barry Moore, in southeast Alabama, who is White. The district will now stretch westward across the state. Black voters will go from comprising less than one-third of the voting-age population to nearly 50%.
Alabama Republicans attempted to get the Supreme Court involved at that time, but the court declined to review the case. Two years later, however, the court accepted a challenge to a similar case under the VRA in Louisiana v. Callais, finally issuing a ruling this year that negates race-based redistricting under the VRA’s Section 2 in all but the most egregious circumstances. Alabama’s legislature then moved to reinstate the legitimate map passed after reapportionment, which the federal court initially halted, prompting this appeal to the Supreme Court.
The court then issued a stay, allowing the original map to be used, leaning heavily on Callais, while the challenge to the map gets a full court hearing at a later date:
After Callais, we vacated District Court injunctions that prevented the State of Alabama from using a congressional map that it enacted in 2023. See Allen v. Caster, 608 U. S. ___ (2026). The District Court had held that the State’s map violated §2 because it had only one district in which black voters were a majority and did not include an additional “[b]lack-opportunity” district. Singleton v. Allen, 782 F. Supp. 3d 1092, 1114, 1309 (ND Ala. 2025). The District Court also concluded that the 2023 map violated the Fourteenth Amendment because it constituted a deliberate “refus[al] to satisfy the remedial requirements” it previously imposed and an attempt to avoid a future judgment requiring the same remedy. Id., at 1355.
Two weeks after we vacated its injunction, the District Court entered another injunction on largely the same grounds. State officials immediately applied to this Court for a stay of this injunction.
At this preliminary stage, the State has shown that it is entitled to interim relief from the District Court’s injunction. See Abbott v. League of United Latin American Citizens, 607 U. S. ___, ___–___ (2025) (slip op., at 1–2). The State is likely to succeed on the merits as to both claims. As to intentional vote dilution, the District Court did not heed the presumption of legislative good faith, see Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, 602 U. S. 1, 10 (2024), because it interpreted the State’s legal disagreement with the court’s earlier remedial order as proof of discriminatory animus. Cf. Abbott v. Perez, 585 U. S. 579, 608–609 (2018). And, as to both claims, the District Court’s analysis departed from Callais. Under Callais, the District Court was required to deny relief unless the plaintiffs’ alternative map performed “just as well” with respect to all of the State’s constitutionally permissible districting criteria. 608 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 29). Yet, the District Court found a violation even though the plaintiffs’ alternative map would not perform just as well as to the State’s constitutionally permissible criteria of keeping together the Gulf Coast community of interest and avoiding the pairing of incumbents. The District Court also failed to follow our instruction in Callais that the mere fact that voters of different races vote for different parties is not relevant to proving racially polarized voting patterns. See id., at ___ (slip op., at 30).
The lower court outright ignored Callais, in which the Supreme Court ruled that race-based redistricting is only legal under the VRA when correcting clear and proven racial animus in the legislative action of drawing these maps. The court instead held a grudge over the state’s appeal of its map and claimed it to be evidence of racial animus, rather than the very reasonable objection to the court usurping the legislature’s authority to draw election maps.
Basically, the court makes clear that it plans to enforce Callais in exactly the manner it laid out in the governing opinion. Lower courts need to rethink earlier VRA Section 2 rulings in light of this decision.
The dissent complains that the timing makes application in this cycle impossible, as well as their earlier complaints about rethinking Section 2 of the VRA in Callais:
Before the Court are two paths. Down one lies an orderly election, held under a tried-and-tested congressional map that protects Black Alabamians’ right to vote and with which all voters, elections officials, and candidates alike are familiar. Down the other lies a chaotic election, held under a never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians, that Alabama adopted in unashamed defiance of a prior court order directly affirmed by this Court, and that will require officials to change the voter registrations of hundreds of thousands of voters in just days at best, a task that Alabama previously represented would take months.
First off, the extant map violates the 14th Amendment on its face, under Callais as well as literally as a race-based construct. It also violates the separation of powers doctrine in having courts usurp legislative authority rather than just make rulings on legislative actions. Third, the reason for the timing of this decision is that the dissenters held up the decision in Callais, reportedly for months, in an illegitimate attempt to exempt this midterm cycle from its impacts. It’s beyond cynical to then claim that the court is acting precipitously to enforce a ruling that should have emerged last year, to negate a court-created map that violates the Constitution in favor of a map drawn legitimately by a state legislature.
Those days are over under Callais. And after this cycle is over, there will be no fig leaves related to timing when it comes to properly executed redistricting in all states on an equal basis.
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