Monday, April 20, 2026, at the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, DC.
Graham Sloan | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for Alabama Republicans to pursue a more favorable congressional voting map for their party ahead of November’s midterm elections, the latest fallout from the court’s landmark ruling on voting rights.
The justices struck down a lower court ruling that blocked the state Republican Party’s preferred map as racist and illegally diluted the voting power of black Alabamians.
The politically conservative southern state is expected to aim to revert to its previous map, which reduced the number of the state’s seven U.S. House districts with a majority or near-majority black voters from two to one. Using the previous map could be an advantage for Republicans.
The order was pushed by the court’s nine-member conservative majority. Three liberal justices dissented and suggested that lower courts could reapply judicial injunctions against maps favored by Alabama Republicans.
President Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans are fighting to maintain control of the House of Representatives as well as the Senate in the midterm elections.
Alabama is one of several Republican-led states seeking to eliminate majority-black congressional districts to boost the party’s chances ahead of the election following a Supreme Court ruling striking down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. Black voters tend to support Democratic candidates.
In a landmark April 29 ruling, the court, in a 6-3 decision supported by conservative lawmakers, struck down the electoral map that had given Louisiana a majority-black second U.S. Congressional District. The majority determined that the redrawn map relied too heavily on race and violated the Constitution’s equal protection principle.
In response to the Supreme Court’s ruling, Alabama immediately filed an emergency motion asking a judge to allow the state to revert to its old map, which had just one majority-black district.
Alabama, where black voters make up a quarter of the state’s electoral districts, had been ordered by a lower court to use a map that included two of its seven majority-black districts. Both are held by Black Democrats.
Lower courts ruled that previous maps intentionally discriminated against black voters and illegally weakened their voting power.
Alabama officials argued in a Supreme Court filing that Alabama’s court-ordered maps have the same constitutional flaws as Louisiana’s.
In a dissenting opinion, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor emphasized that the lower court’s decision regarding the Alabama map is broader than the Louisiana case, including a finding of unconstitutional discrimination by intentionally diluting the votes of black voters in Alabama.
The majority’s decision to overturn the lower court’s ruling is therefore “inappropriate and will only cause confusion as Alabama begins voting in elections scheduled for next week,” Sotomayor wrote in a dissent joined by two of his fellow liberal justices.
He referred to the court’s April 29 decision, called Louisiana v. Calais, which said lower courts “remain free to decide for themselves on remand whether Calais has any bearing on the Fourteenth Amendment analysis or whether prior reasoning is unaffected by that decision.”
The court had upheld a lower court’s ruling in 2023 that the state’s Republican-drawn electoral maps undermined the power of Black voters and violated the Voting Rights Act. The 5-4 decision was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by fellow conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberal justices.
In a process called redistricting, the boundaries of Congressional districts across the United States are reconfigured to reflect population changes as measured by the decennial census. Redistricting has typically been done by state legislatures once every 10 years.
Republicans and Democrats are engaged in a multi-state redistricting battle, sparked last year by President Trump’s unprecedented mid-decade effort to redraw maps in Republican-led states, starting with Texas.
