The Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed Alabama Republicans to enact a congressional map that eliminates one of the state’s two majority-Black districts, lifting a lower-court ruling that had blocked the map on the grounds that it was racially discriminatory.
“The State has also made a strong showing of irreparable harm and that the equities and public interest favor it,” the court said in an unsigned opinion. “We have repeatedly cautioned that lower federal courts should not ‘alter the election rules on the eve of an election.’”
While the opinion was unsigned, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a scathing dissenting opinion, with justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joining her.
“Now the Court is squarely faced with a record of the turmoil it has caused and the harm it has wrought,” Sotomayor wrote. “Yet just as Alabama doubled down on racial discrimination, the Court today doubles down on chaos. Because I choose to defend the rule of law and the right of all Alabamians to participate equally in democracy, I respectfully dissent.”
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Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall had filed an emergency appeal last week with the Supreme Court, a day after a three-judge panel from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama ruled that Republicans could not use a congressional map that a federal court had previously blocked.
In their request, the state’s Republican leaders asked the Supreme Court to grant an administrative stay so the state can proceed with primary elections using the new map, which could flip a seat red in November.
Following the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling in late April that effectively eliminated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, states across the South moved to consider redrawing their congressional lines to favor Republicans. In Alabama, Republicans are pushing to use a map that courts blocked in 2023, which would eliminate Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures’ district.
Federal judges have blocked that 2023 map multiple times, most recently last month after the Supreme Court had directed the lower court to reconsider the issue in light of the Callais ruling. After the lower court again barred Republicans from implementing the map last month, Republicans filed their emergency appeal to the Supreme Court. It was submitted to Justice Clarence Thomas, who oversees emergency appeals regarding the federal judicial circuit in Alabama.
Even though absentee voting for Alabama’s primaries began in March, last week Republican Gov. Kay Ivey called for a special August election for certain U.S. House primary races due to the ongoing litigation over the state’s congressional map. Ballots that had already been cast in those races were nullified.
In their opposition brief to Republicans’ emergency appeal, the Democrats’ lawyers said that the lower-court ruling should be upheld because it is too late to administratively assign voters to new districts in time, and that the premise of the appeal for a block is based on “misrepresentations” to the court.
“The district court never held that Section 2 required Alabama to adopt a majority-Black district or otherwise draw districts on the basis of voters’ race. The district court’s remedial plan is proof positive: it does not contain a second majority-Black district and it was ‘drawn race-blind.’”
In its ruling last week, the three-judge panel called efforts to revert to the map that includes only one majority-Black district “intentionally discriminatory.”
“We cannot see our way clear to requiring Alabamians to cast their votes in the 2026 elections under a districting plan tainted by intentional race-based discrimination,” wrote the judges — two Trump appointees and one Clinton appointee.
Tuesday’s ruling sets Alabama on track to join Tennessee and Louisiana in successfully redrawing their maps following the Supreme Court’s Callais ruling.
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