The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority granted Alabama’s emergency request to use a congressional map that a lower court deemed racially discriminatory even after the high court made voting rights claims harder to prove in Louisiana v. Callais.
In an opinion Tuesday night that is poised to help the GOP in the midterms and beyond, the high court majority said the lower court failed to abide by Callais and failed to give state legislators the benefit of the doubt that they weren’t engaged in intentional discrimination.
In a dissent for the three Democratic appointees, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the majority “disregards both democratic values and the rule of law.”
She said the majority chose a path that will cause “a chaotic election” with a “never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians, that Alabama adopted in unashamed defiance of a prior court order directly affirmed by this Court, and that will require officials to change the voter registrations of hundreds of thousands of voters in just days at best, a task that Alabama previously represented would take months.”
After its April ruling in Callais, the Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed majority ordered the lower court panel in Alabama to review its prior ruling against the state in light of Callais.
On further review, the three-judge panel, which had two Trump-appointed judges on it, still ruled against the state. The panel noted it had previously made a separate finding of intentional discrimination against Black voters, which the Callais ruling didn’t disturb. Plus, the panel said Black voters could separately satisfy the high court’s new Voting Rights Act test from Callais.
The panel judges said they “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.”
Appealing back to the justices, state officials attacked the panel’s intentional discrimination finding as unsound and said the lower court flouted Callais. The Trump administration supported the state’s emergency bid.
Democratic lawmakers from the state urged the justices to reject the Republican-backed effort. “Entering a stay so that Alabama can at the last minute replace a lawful plan with an unlawful and unconstitutional one would create chaos and would reward Applicants for their repeated false statements to this Court,” they said in their opposition filing. They said the state continued to press the “false premise” that the lower court had forced it to draw a race-based congressional map.
Similarly, another group of opponents cited both procedural and substantive objections to high court relief. As an initial matter, the group of Black voters said in a Monday filing that “mere hours remain until Alabama’s statewide voter registration records must be cemented in place for the 2026 elections. Because even Hercules himself could not complete the requisite task in that time, it is simply too late for Alabama to switch congressional maps.” And they said the state “does no better on the merits because this Court’s decision in Callais did nothing to change the facts of this case.”
Likewise, another group of Black voters said Monday that there’s “simply no time left for Alabama officials to switch” to their preferred map. They also stressed that the panel’s ruling rests on the independent finding of intentional discrimination, and that the panel found that the state’s preferred map still violated the Voting Rights Act even after Callais.
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