Supreme Court hands Alabama GOP win on redistricting ahead of midterms 

WASHINGTON (CN) — Boosting Republicans’ redistricting push, the Supreme Court on Tuesday night revived an Alabama congressional map previously ruled to be racially discriminatory.

In a late night unsigned order, the justices blocked a lower court order prohibiting the use of Alabama’s 2023 maps. According to the apparent 6-3 majority, the lower court failed to consider if Republican lawmakers were acting with good faith when leaving Black voters in the minority in all but one congressional district.

“The state has also made a strong showing of irreparable harm and that the equities and public interest favor it,” the court wrote. “We have repeatedly cautioned that lower federal courts should not ‘ alter the election rules on the eve of an election.’”

In dissent, the liberal justices said it was their colleagues on the Supreme Court who were to blame for sowing chaos in Alabama’s electoral process.

“Now the court is squarely faced with a record of the turmoil it has caused and the harm it has wrought,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote in a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Yet just as Alabama doubled down on racial discrimination, the court today doubles down on chaos.”

Sotomayor issued a sharp condemnation of the majority’s actions, declaring her dissent defended the rule of law and the right of all Alabamians to participate equally in democracy. She said the decision was wrong on the merits and inflicted grave harms on the public.

“It debases the democratic process by upending Alabama’s entire election in the name of permitting Alabama to discriminate against Black Alabamians,” Sotomayor wrote. “It also corrodes the rule of law by rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship and outright defiance of court orders.”

State lawmakers pushed to reinstate the 2023 map after the high court’s recent landmark voting rights ruling. Alabama said the decision vindicated the lawfulness of the plan, arguing voters shouldn’t be forced to vote under a court-drawn map that doesn’t meet the state’s districting goals.

Alabama’s 2024 election was held under districts drawn by a special master over the yearslong litigation over representation for Black voters. Black Alabamians make up 27% of the state’s voting-age population but only represent the majority in one of seven of the state’s congressional districts. Alabama lawmakers have been fighting adding a second majority-Black district for the better part of five years.

Sotomayor said Tuesday’s order rewarded Alabama for repeatedly refusing to give Black voters additional representation despite being ordered by several courts to do so.

“After today, it is hard to call Alabama’s cynical gambit anything other than a success, and the court’s rewarding of Alabama’s behavior anything other than a blow to the rule of law,” Sotomayor wrote.

In 2021, voters and civil rights groups challenged the state’s newly enacted congressional map for spreading Black voters in southern Alabama across three congressional districts. They argued the map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — which bars racial discrimination in voting — by leaving Black voters in the minority across each new district.

The Supreme Court found the map unlawful in 2023, ordering lawmakers to redraw the districts to include additional opportunity districts for Black voters to elect their candidates of choice. But Republican leadership refused to comply, implementing the 2023 maps at the center of the current litigation.

A panel held a second time that the 2023 maps did not give enough representation to Black Alabamians, blocking their use. Alabama asked the Supreme Court to halt a court-mandated redraw of its maps, but the justices refused to do so at the time.

Last year, a federal panel held the Legislature intentionally discriminated against Black voters in its 2023 maps by deliberately enacting a plan it knew did not comply with prior court orders and Voting Rights Act standards.

The panel ordered the state to continue using a previously ordered remedial plan and scheduled further proceedings to consider placing the state under federal preclearance guidelines that were only lifted in 2020.

After the Supreme Court’s blockbuster ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, Republicans filed a flurry of emergency appeals to implement the 2023 map for upcoming elections. The justices cleared the way for its use, but a federal three-judge panel ruled there was no clear way for Alabamians to vote “under a districting plan tainted by intentional race-based discrimination.”

The majority said the lower court did not properly apply the updated Callais standard. But the dissent questioned that reasoning, noting the Callais majority’s insistence its ruling was confined to the Voting Rights Act, not the Constitution.

“It is hard to see how the district court’s finding of discriminatory intent under the Fourteenth Amendment could have departed from an opinion that purported to say nothing about how to find discriminatory intent under the Fourteenth Amendment,” Sotomayor wrote. “The court’s apparently oblivious insistence to the contrary today cannot be squared with what *Callais *said on its face just over one month ago.”

Sotomayor said the record was “crystal clear,” stating that Republican lawmakers adopted redistricting criteria that made it mathematically impossible to remedy racial discrimination.

And she said Alabama provided minimal evidence to explain its actions as driven by partisanship. In 2019 — two years before the current litigation began — the Supreme Court prohibited federal courts from hearing challenges to partisan gerrymanders.

“[T]he Alabama Legislature had every incentive to dress up its redistricting effort in partisan garb,” Sotomayor wrote. “It is telling that it barely managed a fig leaf.”

Governor Kay Ivey canceled primary elections scheduled to begin May 19. He subsequently called for special primaries on Aug. 11 in four districts.

State lawmakers said the justices needed to act by June 1, but voters and civil rights groups insisted the emergency appeal was already too late. June 1 is an official state holiday commemorating Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Sotomayor said Tuesday’s order will force county election officials to reassign hundreds of thousands of voters across the state to new congressional districts — a process that must be done manually. Those changes must be made in a matter of hours, according to election officials’ deadline for changes.

“A state that once decried pulling the rug out from under voters, elections officials, and candidates now seems determined to do just that,” Sotomayor wrote.

Follow @KelseyReichmann Follow @kelseyreichmann.bsky.social