The U.S. Supreme Court will convene in Washington, DC, on May 28, 2026.
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The Supreme Court on Tuesday night allowed Alabama to use new maps for congressional districts that lower federal courts had ruled were discriminatory against Black voters.
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling eliminates one of Alabama’s two majority-black districts and is expected to result in Republicans gaining one House seat from the state in November’s midterm elections. Republicans are expected to win the 2nd District seat, currently held by Democratic Rep. Shomali Figures.
Republicans hold a slim majority in the House. Since last year, many states have forced redistricting to maintain their majorities in the next election, leading to similar efforts by Democrats in other states.
The ruling by the Supreme Court’s six-member conservative majority was not signed. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent, joined by fellow liberal justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The majority said the lower court’s decision to block the map ignored precedent that required a “presumption of good faith…” on the part of the Alabama Legislature, which adopted the map, because it “interpreted the state’s legal disagreement with the court’s prior remedial orders as evidence of discriminatory hostility.”
“There are two paths before the court,” Sotomayor wrote in his dissent.
“Below is an orderly election under a proven parliamentary map.”
It protects the voting rights of Black Alabamians, and it is something that every voter, election official, and candidate alike knows well,” Sotomayor wrote.
“On the other side lies a chaotic election held under a never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against black Alabamans, which Alabama adopted in shameless disregard for a prior court order directly affirmed by this court, requiring officials to change the voter registrations of hundreds of thousands of voters in a matter of days at most, a task that would have taken Alabama months to complete,” she wrote.
“The majority has chosen the latter path, ignoring both democratic values and the rule of law. I respectfully disagree.”
Tuesday’s ruling overturns a May 26 ruling by a three-judge panel in the U.S. District Court in Birmingham, Alabama, which found the state’s proposed 2023 map “intentionally discriminates on the basis of race.”
The commission had been forced to reconsider an earlier ruling banning the use of maps in state elections in light of a recent Supreme Court ruling in a case known as Louisiana v. Calais.
The Supreme Court in this case found that Louisiana’s drawing of its own congressional map constituted racial gerrymandering in the creation of a second-majority black district.
“At this preliminary stage, the state has shown that it is entitled to preliminary relief from the district court’s injunction against the use of the 2023 map,” said Tuesday evening’s majority decision in the Alabama case.
The majority said “the state is likely to prevail on both arguments” in a lawsuit challenging the map’s use.
