Alabama can revert to a congressional map with only a single majority-Black district, the Supreme Court ruled Monday. The decision, based on the high court’s recent ruling on the Voting Rights Act, opens a path for Republicans to pick up an additional U.S. House seat.
Alabama officials had urged the high court to allow the state to use a 2023 map that cuts two majority-Black congressional districts down to one, part of a move by several states across the South to redraw maps since the Supreme Court struck down part of the federal law protecting minority districts.
The state had previously been barred from changing its congressional and state legislative maps until 2030. The court’s ruling comes a week before Alabama’s primaries are set to take place.
“Alabama’s case mirrors Louisiana’s, and they should end the same way: with this year’s elections run with districts based on lawful policy goals, not race,” state officials said in one of a series of emergency requests to the Supreme Court.
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Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, writing that Monday’s ruling “unceremoniously discards the district court’s meticulously documented and supported discriminatory-intent finding and careful remedial order without any sound basis for doing so and without regard for the confusion that will surely ensure.”
The ruling did not contain any opinions nor explanations from the court’s majority for lifting the lower court order.
Alabama’s current congressional map was drawn to the standards of the Voting Rights Act before last month’s decision, and has two districts with a majority of Black voters represented by Democratic Reps. Shomari Figures and Terri Sewell. Figures flipped a GOP seat in 2024, and his election marked the first time Alabama had two Black representatives in Congress.
Sewell said in a statement that the court’s “right-wing majority has completely ignored its previous rulings in order to give state officials the green light to suppress Black representation in Alabama.”
Figures posted on X that the court had not dismissed the case, and that litigation will “certainly continue.”
“My hope is that this is a temporary setback and that three Republican appointed judges will again find what they found the first time: that the state of Alabama intentionally discriminated against Black voters in drawing its congressional district lines,” Figures wrote.
The Alabama Legislature could use a map Republicans approved in 2023 that concentrates the state’s Black voters into the 7th Congressional District for a 50.65% majority, while diluting the percentage of Black voters in the 2nd Congressional District to 40%.
In anticipation of the court’s Monday ruling, state lawmakers advanced legislation Friday that would trigger new primary elections in four congressional districts using the previously adopted map that had been struck down. Tensions ran high among protesters at the statehouse that day.
Gov. Kay Ivey is expected to set a date soon for the new primaries to be held before August.
“Alabama has done its part in helping President Trump maintain a Republican Congress, and we will continue fighting to ensure that our elections are decided by Alabamians, not activist judges,” state House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter said in a statement after the chamber adjourned its special session last week.
Republican state lawmakers, including those in South Carolina and Louisiana, are also considering redistricting proposals and legislation to push back congressional primaries. Meanwhile, Black Democrats in Congress are bracing for a swath of lost seats across the region.
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