Supreme Court Allows Alabama Gop To Erase Black House District

The Supreme Court has given Alabama the go-ahead to use a congressional map that will likely remove a Democratic incumbent from the state.

In a 6-3 ruling issued Monday, the court’s conservative majority granted a request from Alabama’s Republican leaders to lift an injunction that blocked the state from using a map the Legislature adopted in 2023. That map includes only one majority-Black district, while the current House map includes a second majority-minority district in which nearly half the population is Black.

The current map had been imposed by a federal court after it ruled that the Voting Rights Act required the state to draw that second district. State lawmakers had refused to do so, instead drawing a map that had only one majority-Black district. Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures was elected in 2024 under that new, court-imposed map.

Monday’s ruling removes the injunction that forced Alabama to continue using that map. The high court’s majority did not issue an opinion explaining its reasoning, but simply said the lower court’s decision should be reconsidered in light of the decision last month in Louisiana v. Callais, where the justices sharply narrowed the requirement to draw district lines to create so-called opportunity districts to comply with the Voting Rights Act.

Under a law passed Friday by Alabama’s Legislature, the district lines the state sought to adopt in 2023 now go into effect as a result of the Supreme Court’s action. That would give Republicans an edge in six of the state’s seven House districts, netting the GOP one additional House seat they are favored to win in the upcoming midterms.

All the high court’s liberal justices dissented from the order Monday.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by the court’s other two Democratic appointees, said the Supreme Court’s conservative majority erred by summarily overturning the conclusion of a three-judge court that the 2023 plan was the product of deliberate discrimination against Black voters.

“That constitutional finding of intentional discrimination is independent of, and unaffected by, any of the legal issues discussed in Callais,” Sotomayor wrote.

Sotomayor noted that the lower-court finding at issue in the Alabama case rested on a violation not of the VRA but of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection guarantee.

Under the newly passed law, the results of next week’s May 19 primaries in House districts unaffected by the map change will still be counted, but those in impacted districts will be ignored. Republican Gov. Kay Ivey is expected to schedule another round of primaries in those districts.

Sotomayor said it was “inappropriate” for the court to take an action that effectively changes Alabama’s district lines just days before the primary, adding that the court’s move “will cause only confusion as Alabamians begin to vote in the elections scheduled for next week.”

Vacating a lower court decision “is an equitable remedy, and the Court should not lightly wield it to unleash chaos and to confuse voters,” Sotomayor added.

Andrew Howard contributed to this article.