Supreme Court clears way for Alabama Republicans to pursue new voting map

TheU.S.SupremeCourtcleared the way onMondayfor Alabama Republicans to pursue a congressional voting map more favorable to their party ahead of November’s midterm elections, the latest fallout from thecourt’s seismicvoting rights ruling.

The justices lifted a lowercourt’s decision that had blocked state Republicans’ preferred map as racially discriminatory and for illegally diluting the voting power of Black Alabamians.

The politically conservative Southern state is expected to seek to revert to this previous map, which would drop the number of districts where Black voters comprise a majority, or near-majority, from two to one out of the state’s seven U.S. House districts.Use of the previous map could be beneficial to Republicans.

The order was powered by the nine-membercourt’s conservative majority. The three liberal justices dissented and suggested that the lowercourtcould reapply its judicial block to the Alabama Republicans’ preferred map.

PresidentDonald Trump‘s fellow Republicans are fighting to maintain their control of the House, as well as the Senate, in the midterm elections.

Alabama is among a group of Republican-led states that has sought to eliminate majority-Black congressional districts and boost their party’s chances ahead of the elections following theSupremeCourt’s ruling undercutting a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. Black voters tend to support Democratic candidates.

In its landmark April 29 ruling, thecourt, in a 6-3 ruling powered by its conservative members, struck down an electoral map that had given Louisiana a second Black-majority U.S. ​congressional district. The redrawn map, the majority ruled, had relied too heavily on race in violation of the constitutional equal protection principle.

Following theSupremeCourt’s decision, Alabama immediately filed emergency motions asking the justices to allow it to revert to an older map with only a single majority-Black district.

Alabama, where Black voters make up a quarter of the electorate, had beenorderedby a lowercourtto use a map that includes two majority-Black districts out of seven. Both are held by Black Democrats.

The lowercourtdecided that a prior map hadintentionally discriminatedagainst Black voters andunlawfully dilutedtheir voting power.

Alabama officials had argued inSupremeCourtfilings that Alabama’scourt-ordered map shared the same constitutional defects as Louisiana’s.

In a dissent, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor emphasized that the lowercourt’s ruling concerning Alabama’s map was more expansive than the case involving Louisiana and included a finding of unconstitutional discrimination by intentionally diluting the votes of Black voters in Alabama.

The majority’s decision to set aside the lowercourt’s ruling is therefore “inappropriate and will cause only confusion as Alabamians begin to vote in the elections scheduled for next week,” Sotomayor wrote in a dissent that was joined by her two fellow liberal justices.

She said the lowercourt”remains free on remand to decide for itself whether Callais has any bearing on its Fourteenth Amendment analysis or if its prior reasoning is unaffected by that decision,” referring to thecourt’s April 29 decision, called Louisiana v. Callais.

In 2023, thecourthad upheld the lowercourt’s decision that the state’s Republican-drawn electoral mapdilutedBlack voters’ power, violating the Voting Rights Act. That 5-4 ruling was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, and he was joined by fellow conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh and thecourt’s three liberal justices.

In a process called redistricting, the boundaries of legislative districts across the United States are reconfigured to reflect population changes as measured by the national census conducted every 10 years. Redistricting typically has been carried out by state legislatures once per decade.

Republicans and Democrats have been waging a multistate redistricting fight ignited last year when Trump initiated an unprecedented mid-decade effort to redraw maps in Republican-led states, starting with Texas.