The Supreme Court on Tuesday night cleared the way for Alabama to eliminate a majority-Black congressional district, a win for Republicans as they fight to hold onto their slim majority in the House.
The ruling served as the first major test since the justices in April raised the bar to bring legal challenges under the landmark Voting Rights Act.
The decision was unsigned, but the court’s three liberal justices joined in dissent.
The ruling’s practical effect is that Alabama can swap out its current congressional district map, which has two majority-Black districts, for a map that has only one — giving the Republicans a crucial advantage in flipping the seat back into conservative hands.
But with the order, the court also sent a message for how it will view discrimination claims going forward.
The justices struck down a unanimous ruling by a panel of three federal judges that had found that the map with only one majority-Black district discriminated against Black voters by diluting the power of their votes. The lower court had concluded that there was evidence the map had been drawn intentionally to discriminate, but the justices rejected that finding, writing that the lower court’s analysis had “departed” from the Supreme Court’s recent Voting Rights Act decision.
The ruling underscores how much more difficult it will be for groups and individuals to prove that legislative maps discriminate on the basis of race going forward. Just three years ago, the Supreme Court rejected the same map it has now accepted.
Primary elections for races other than Congress were held last month in Alabama. But Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, delayed primaries in four congressional districts until early August, hoping for a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court in the meantime. The four districts include two that are now held by white Republicans, as well as two districts held by Black Democrats.
Those districts will change under the new map.
By now, the fight over Alabama’s congressional district map is a familiar one for the Supreme Court. In a state with a fraught history of segregation and institutional racism, the courts have been involved for years in ordering Alabama officials to comply with landmark voting and civil rights laws.
It was a 1992 lawsuit that forced the creation of what had been Alabama’s lone majority-Black district, the Seventh Congressional District. But after the 2020 census, groups of Black voters challenged the state’s refusal to create a second majority-Black district, noting that more than one in four residents of Alabama are Black.
Those voters argued that state officials ran afoul of the Voting Rights Act by maintaining six majority-white districts and one majority-Black district, failing to ensure that minority groups have an opportunity to select candidates of their choice.
In June 2023, the Supreme Court agreed, striking down the map in a 5 to 4 decision and finding that state lawmakers had diluted the power of Black voters. Even after that decision, Alabama lawmakers adopted a district map that had only one majority-Black district, defying orders from a lower federal court to create a second majority-Black district or something “close to it.”
At that point, a federal court ordered a special master to independently draw a new map. The map the special master put forward included a second district with a significant percentage of Black voters, paving the way for the election of Representative Shomari Figures, a Black Democrat, in 2024. He joined Representative Terri A. Sewell, also a Black Democrat, in Congress, marking the first time in the state’s history that two Black lawmakers had served Alabama in the House at the same time.
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A Republican challenge to this map was pending before the Supreme Court when the court issued its landmark Voting Rights Act decision in April.
In that case, Louisiana v. Callais, the justices split along ideological lines and struck down Louisiana’s voting map, finding that state lawmakers had violated the Constitution by enacting a map that created a second majority-Black district.
In the decision, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. laid out a new, stricter standard to bring legal challenges under the Voting Rights Act, explaining the majority had determined it was time to “update the framework” for bringing claims under the law. He cited “vast social change” across the country, particularly in the South, since the 1960s.
From now on, Justice Alito said, challengers would have to show strong evidence that maps had been drawn to intentionally discriminate on the basis of race and not just to achieve partisan advantage. Previously, a challenger had to merely show that using the map would have discriminatory effects, but not that it had been drawn with that intent.
That ruling started a new wave of redistricting, adding to an ongoing gerrymandering war launched by President Trump in Texas as he and Republicans sought to redraw maps to try to keep control of the House.
Both Tennessee and Louisiana approved maps that eliminated majority-Black districts in response. Other Southern states — like South Carolina and Georgia — decided not to enact new maps before the 2026 midterm elections but signaled an appetite for changing their district lines before the end of the decade.
In Alabama, rather than draw a new map, officials tried to use the 2023 map that had been previously blocked by the courts. In May, they asked the Supreme Court to direct the lower courts to revisit that decision in light of Justice Alito’s ruling.
Next came a surprise: When a panel of three federal judges re-examined the state’s map through the prism of the Supreme Court’s April decision, it unanimously agreed to block the map again.
In a 79-page decision issued on May 26, the panel, which included two Trump appointees, wrote that it had carefully re-examined the evidence and again concluded that the map would be discriminatory. The judges said they could not “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.”
The judges added that they were “painfully aware of the gravity of our ruling.” But, they added, “we do not find the issue particularly complex or close.”
Republican leaders then asked the Supreme Court to weigh in and clear the way for their preferred map, arguing that they were under time pressure as they prepared for the elections.
The challengers, including civil rights groups and Democratic state politicians, urged the court to reject the Republican state lawmakers’ request, asserting that overturning the lower court’s finding would allow Alabama to “replace a lawful plan with an unlawful and unconstitutional one” in a move that “would create chaos.”
They also said that it was too late to make changes to the map before the election.
