Eliminating a majority-Black district

Supreme Court allows Alabama to use House map eliminating a majority-Black district

A federal court had repeatedly blocked the map as an illegal racial gerrymander.

By Josh Gerstein and Andrew Howard

The Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed Alabama to eliminate one of its two majority-Black districts as part of a plan to give Republicans an additional House seat in the state.

The ruling will be in effect for this year’s elections — the latest win for Republicans in the redistricting arms race that has consumed the battle for the House over the last year in states across the country.

The justices divided 6-3 along ideological lines as they lifted a lower-court order that blocked the map, devised by Alabama’s GOP-led legislature in 2023, on the grounds that it violated the Constitution by diluting the votes of Black voters. The plan is likely to give Republicans a 6-1 advantage over Democrats in Alabama’s House delegation, compared to the current 5-2 split, by dramatically altering the district held by Rep. Shomari Figures (D-Ala.).

With the court greenlighting the 6-1 map, primaries in four of the seven districts will take place on Aug. 11, after GOP Gov. Kay Ivey delayed them in order to account for a new map. The three districts that did not change under the 2023 map have already voted.

It’s the court’s first major ruling on racial discrimination in redistricting since it drastically narrowed a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in April, prompting Republicans across the South to begin the process of dismantling majority-Black districts to create GOP seats.

Since that ruling, Louisiana Republicans eliminated one of the state’s two majority-Black districts, and Tennessee’s GOP-led legislature dismantled its lone-remaining Black district last month.

In the ruling released after 9 P.M. Tuesday, the Supreme Court’s majority said the lower court “did not heed the presumption of legislative good faith” when it found the lines Alabama sought to use unconstitutionally tainted by racial discrimination.

The unsigned, four-page majority opinion also faulted the lower-court judges for not giving adequate weight to the Alabama state legislature’s “constitutionally permissible” goals of having a single district represent the Gulf Coast and avoiding forcing Republican incumbents into running against each other.

Tuesday’s decision prompted a fight on the high court over the proper interpretation of an election law principle it laid down two decades ago, which called on federal judges to avoid making late-breaking changes to voting procedures, including for district lines.

The court’s conservative majority said the lower court erred by disrupting Alabama’s plans on the eve of an election and insisted that late tinkering by a state, on the other hand, is permissible..

“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 majority wrote.

But Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s 17-page dissent accused Alabama of “weaponization” of the so-called Purcell principle by intentionally making late changes that are legally dubious and then hoping to escape federal court scrutiny.

Sotomayor faulted Alabama for taking “utterly irreconcilable positions” on the logistical challenges and risks involved in last-minute changes to voting maps. She noted that in 2022, the state claimed that changes months before an election would be too disruptive, but the state is now seeking to make similar changes in a matter of days.

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

Sotomayor also repeatedly accused her court’s conservative majority of issuing rulings that cause confusion among voters and election officials.

“Just as Alabama doubled down on racial discrimination, the Court today doubles down on chaos,” Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Alabama Republicans have sought for years to keep the congressional map to just one majority-Black district.

After the 2020 census, Alabama’s Legislature adopted a map that maintained only one so-called “opportunity” district where Black voters were likely to be able to select a candidate of their choice. The map was used for the 2022 elections, but the Supreme Court issued an unexpected, 5-4 ruling the following year that found the map likely violated the Voting Rights Act.

A federal court rejected a new map the state adopted in 2023 and imposed a court-ordered map that created a second “opportunity” district for Black voters. The state remained under an injunction blocking the legislature-drawn 2023 map, but – following the April Voting Rights Act ruling – filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court asking the injunction be lifted.

The justices voted, 6-3, to grant that request last month. That ruling set in motion another round of litigation before the lower, three-judge court which issued a fresh block on Alabama’s still-unused 2023 map. That’s the order the Supreme Court lifted on Tuesday.