Alabama asks Supreme Court to block redistricting ruling

The was born in Alabama. On March 7, 1965, state troopers under Governor George Wallace's command attacked 600 marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, fracturing skulls with clubs and driving horses into crowds. The images shocked the country. Eight days later, on March 15, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress and used the words of the civil rights movement himself: "We shall overcome." Congress passed the Voting Rights Act 65 days after the attack. Alabama is the state where the VRA was born. It is also the state that has spent the six decades since fighting its enforcement.

The VRA's most powerful tool was Section 5 preclearance, which required covered jurisdictions, including all of Alabama, to get federal approval before changing any voting law. For 48 years, Alabama couldn't move a polling place or redraw a single district without first clearing it with the DOJ or a federal court. That oversight ended on June 25, 2013, when the Supreme Court decided Shelby County v. Holder in a 5-4 ruling written by Chief Justice John Roberts. Shelby County is an Alabama jurisdiction. Roberts struck down the coverage formula that determined which states fell under Section 5. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, comparing the ruling to throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you aren't getting wet. Within hours of the decision, Alabama's legislature passed a strict photo ID law it had been holding in reserve, unable to enact it while preclearance remained in effect.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall filed applications with the U.S. Supreme Court on May 27, 2026, targeting a preliminary injunction issued one day earlier by a three-judge federal panel in Birmingham. The panel, in cases consolidated as Allen v. Singleton, Allen v. Caster, and Allen v. Milligan, blocked Alabama from using its 2023 congressional map in the 2026 midterm elections. Marshall directed the applications to Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, who serves as circuit justice for the 11th Circuit. Marshall argued the panel's injunction conflicts with the Supreme Court's April 2026 decision in Louisiana v. Callais. In his public statement, Marshall said he believes Alabama should have "a 7-0 Republican congressional delegation that reflects Alabama's voters," a goal he stated publicly the same day he filed the emergency applications.

Justice Clarence Thomas declined to immediately restore Alabama's 2023 map through an administrative stay. Instead, Thomas ordered the voting rights plaintiffs to respond to Alabama's emergency applications by 4 p.m. on June 1, 2026, leaving the court-ordered remedial map in place. Thomas's handling of this application carries its own history. In his 1994 concurrence in Holder v. Hall, Thomas called Section 2 of the VRA a "sordid business" that "divvies us up by race" and argued that race-conscious remedies were themselves unconstitutional under the . He has long held that VRA-based majority-minority districts are no different from the racial discrimination they were designed to remedy. The June 1 deadline created a calendar collision: Secretary of State Wes Allen was required to certify candidate names to probate judges by May 29, and Governor Kay Ivey extended that deadline to June 3.

The three-judge panel, Circuit Judge Stanley Marcus and District Judges Anna Manasco and Terry Moorer, ruled in a 102-page opinion on May 26, 2026 that Alabama's 2023 congressional map was "tainted by intentional race-based discrimination." Both Manasco and Moorer were appointed by President Donald Trump. The panel wrote that it "cannot understand the 2023 Plan as anything other than an intentional effort to dilute Black Alabamians' voting strength." The ruling ordered Secretary of State Allen to use a special master's race-blind remedial map for all remaining 2026 election proceedings.

The district at the center of this fight, Alabama's 7th congressional district, runs from Birmingham south through Tuscaloosa, cuts through the Black Belt counties of Dallas, Perry, and Wilcox, and reaches down to Mobile. The Black Belt gets its name from the dark, fertile soil that once made it plantation country, where enslaved people outnumbered white residents by ratios of 10 to 1 in some counties before the Civil War. In 1992, Earl Hilliard won Alabama's 7th congressional district, becoming the first Black congressman from Alabama since Reconstruction. Alabama had sent no Black representative to Congress for more than 90 years. Hilliard's election came because the VRA required Alabama to draw a district where Black voters could elect a candidate of their choice. The 2026 fight is over whether that district, and a second one, can be sustained.

Alabama is a state where Black residents make up more than 26% of the voting-age population but held meaningful influence in only one of seven congressional districts under the 2023 legislative map. The court-ordered remedial map, drawn by a special master, created two Black-opportunity districts: the 2nd, running through the old Black Belt plantation counties from Dallas to Mobile, and the 7th, anchored in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa. The 2nd district under the remedial map has a Black voting-age population of 48.7% and the 7th has 50.65%. The remedial map governed the 2024 congressional elections, in which Black voters had the opportunity to elect preferred candidates in two districts for the first time in Alabama's modern history.

The backdrop to the stay application is the Supreme Court's April 29, 2026 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, a 6-3 decision written by Justice Samuel Alito that significantly narrowed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The majority held that because the VRA did not require Louisiana to draw a second majority-Black district, using race as the predominant factor to create one was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Justice Elena Kagan wrote the dissent, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Kagan wrote that the majority had made a nullity of Section 2 and threatened a half-century's worth of gains in voting equality. Legal scholars immediately flagged that the ruling would prompt Republican-controlled legislatures across the South to challenge VRA-compliant maps.

Within days of Callais, Alabama's Republican-controlled legislature convened a special session and passed legislation reinstating the 2023 congressional map, which a federal court had previously struck down as violating both Section 2 of the VRA and the 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court initially allowed Alabama to proceed with the 2023 map, clearing the way for the state to change its district lines mid-election, even though absentee voting for some races had already begun. Voting rights groups filed emergency motions asking the district court to block the map, arguing that even after Callais, Alabama couldn't use a map the courts had already found was enacted with intentional racially discriminatory purpose.

The three-judge panel agreed. In its May 26, 2026 ruling, the court wrote that Alabama "cannot use Callais to legitimize its pre-Callais decision to double down on the discriminatory vote dilution that we and the Supreme Court found." The panel emphasized that while Callais made Section 2 VRA claims much harder to win, intentional racial discrimination under the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause remains independently actionable. Davin Rosborough, deputy director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project and lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said: "The court recognized what we already knew: the Alabama legislature's repeated refusal to provide Black Alabamians with fair representation in Congress is racial discrimination."

The litigation has deep roots. In 2021, voting rights groups challenged Alabama's congressional map for the first time, arguing it diluted Black political power by packing Black voters into a single district. In 2023, the Supreme Court affirmed the lower court ruling in Allen v. Milligan, agreeing that Alabama likely violated the VRA. Alabama's Republican legislature responded by passing the 2023 map, which the three-judge panel immediately found still failed to provide a second Black-opportunity district. The court then selected Remedial Plan 3, creating the 48.7% Black voting-age population in the 2nd district and the 50.65% Black majority in the 7th. That map governed the 2024 elections and the May 2026 primary, until Alabama's legislature moved to cancel those races and reinstate the 2023 map in the weeks after Callais.

The stay application puts Alabama's redistricting fight directly in the hands of the same Supreme Court that created the Callais framework Alabama sought to exploit. If the Court grants the stay, Alabama's 2023 map governs the August 11 special election, and Black voters in the 2nd and 7th districts lose the political representation they held under the remedial map. If the Court denies the stay, the race-blind special master map remains in force. The broader stakes extend beyond Alabama. Several other Southern states, including Louisiana, are watching to see whether the Court treats intentional racial discrimination under the 14th Amendment as insulated from the new Callais framework. Alabama's seven congressional seats are all currently held by Republicans, but the remedial map creates two districts where Black voters have enough electoral power to elect candidates of their choice.

Alabama asks Supreme Court to block redistricting ruling

Republican Redistricting and Gerrymandering

Alabama asks Supreme Court to block redistricting ruling