A May 16 voting rights demonstration outside the state capital in Montgomery, Alabama.Dan Anderson/Zuma
For the second time in three weeks, the Roberts Court on Tuesday night green-lit an Alabama congressional map that a lower court has repeatedly found intentionally discriminates against Black voters. The ruling is another stark example of how far the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority will go to give their party additional seats in Congress and erase Black representation in the South.
Black voters comprise 27 percent of Alabama’s population, but, under a map put in place by Alabama Republicans after the justices’ Louisiana v. Callais decision that destroyed the Voting Rights Act, can expect to elect their candidate of choice in just one of the state’s seven congressional districts. Last week, after the Supreme Court told it to reexamine the case in light of Callais, a three-judge federal court panel with two Trump appointees blocked that map for November finding that the legislature’s refusal to draw a second majority-Black district despite a previous court order showed evidence of intentional discrimination against Black voters. “Ultimately, 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,” the judges wrote in a unanimous opinion.
The ruling is a stark example of how far the court’s Republican-appointed majority will go to give their party additional seats in Congress and erase Black representation.
But the Roberts Court overturned that ruling in a truly radical four-page unsigned opinion released late Tuesday night. The court’s conservative majority claimed that the lower court “did not heed the presumption of legislative good faith,” a standard it essentially made up two years ago to insulate GOP gerrymanders from racial gerrymandering claims. In fact, the lower court found that the Alabama legislature had clearly acted in bad faith by deliberating evading court orders to create a second majority-Black district.
The majority opinion also said the lower court had failed to follow the new standards it laid out in Callais for evaluating racial gerrymandering claims. “When Section 2 of the Act is properly interpreted, it imposes liability only when circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred,” the court wrote in Callais. But that finding of intentional discrimination is exactly what the lower court based its latest opinion on, finding that unconstitutional vote dilution had occured in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, which the Callais decision didn’t even address.
Finally, the Roberts Court claimed that “the District Court interposed itself into Alabama’s ongoing efforts to conduct its imminent 2026 congressional elections,” even though it was the Supreme Court that reinstated Alabama’s map one week before the primaries, leading to widespread confusion and votes cast during early voting being tossed. “While federal courts should not impose changes close to an election, States are free to decide for themselves whether last-minute changes to an election are in their best interests,” the Supreme Court ruled. That rule will allow states to issue last-minute election changes that disenfranchise voters but leave federal courts powerless to stop them.
“In addition to being wrong on the merits, the Court’s decision inflicts two grave harms on the public,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting opinion. “It debases the democratic process by upending Alabama’s entire election in the name of permitting Alabama to discriminate against Black Alabamians. It also corrodes the rule of law by rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship and outright defiance of court orders.”
In the short term, the court’s conservative majority has gifted another seat to Republicans in the battle over control of the US House. But this case is bigger than just Alabama. Tuesday’s ruling provides even more evidence of how the Roberts Court has put their thumb on the scale of the midterms in unprecedented ways to benefit the GOP.
First, they issued the Callais opinion in late April—rather than June, as is customary for major rulings—to give Republican-controlled states just enough time to redraw their maps to take away Democratic seats. That allowed Southern states including Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana to pass new maps with alarming speed eliminating their Black representation in Congress.
Second, despite repeatedly claiming in the past that federal courts should not intervene in voting-related disputes in the middle of an election season, in Callais the court’s Republican appointees struck down the creation of a second-majority Black district in Louisiana just three weeks before the state’s primary, while mail voting was underway and 45,000 voters had already cast ballots. And instead of waiting the standard month to certify its decision, the court put Callais into effect immediately, allowing Republican Gov. Jeff Landry to suspend the state’s House primaries to give the legislature time to eliminate one of two majority-Black districts.
Third, just days after the court intervened on behalf of Louisiana Republicans, the conservative justices allowed Alabama to put in place a new Congressional map—the same map they again waved through Tuesday—eliminating one of the state’s majority-Black districts just one week before the primary, after mail voting had already begun.
On Tuesday, the court once again used its shadow docket to side with Alabama Republicans, overruling last week’s extensive lower court opinion with little explanation to hand the GOP another seat in November. With its repeated eleventh-hour interventions in favor of the Republican Party, the Roberts Court has weaponized its rulings to manufacture its preferred political outcomes, removing any doubt about how partisan it has become.
The latest Alabama ruling is stunning both in its timing, but also for its flagrant disregard of everything the court claimed it held in Callais. As my colleague Pema Levy and I have written, the court said in Callais that it was not overturning the 2023 Allen v. Milligan decision that led to the creation of a second majority-Black decision in Alabama. But it has effectively done just that on the shadow docket.
Similarly, the court ruled in Callais that districts can only be challenged under the Voting Rights Act if there is evidence of intentional discrimination by those passing the map—a nearly impossible standard. But the federal court panel in Alabama reexamined the case after Callais and found that evidence of intentional discrimination still dominated. “We do not lightly intrude in state affairs, but our previous review of the undisputed evidence left us in no doubt that Alabama’s legislatively enacted plan (the ‘2023 Plan’) intentionally discriminated based on race in violation of the Constitution,” the three-judge panel wrote. “Our re-examination in light of Callais yields the same conclusion.”
As we wrote last week, the three-judge panel took Callais at its word. But on Tuesday, the Supreme Court swept aside the lower court ruling without even grappling with those judges’ extensive findings, going even further than Callais to essentially suggest that that no amount of smoking gun evidence of racial discrimination will ever lead the court to strike down a map that benefits Republicans.
“The Supreme Court’s decision gives cover to Alabama and others to deliberately and openly discriminate against Black voters without fear of any consequence,” said Deuel Ross, Director of Litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Chief Justice John Roberts may claim with a straight face that the justices are not “political actors,” but based on its actions over the past month alone, it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that the Roberts Court wants to do everything in its power to create a world in which there will be no Black House members from the South and where Democrats have no chance to retake control of Congress. Their end goal appears to be permanent white Republican minority rule.
As Sotomayor wrote, “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.”
