In February 2025, three federal judges in Alabama presided over an 11-day trial that included more than 20 witnesses, 40 lawyers and nearly 800 exhibits about the state’s proposed congressional district map.
At the end, the judges, including two appointed by President Trump, concluded that the Republican-led state legislature in Alabama had intentionally discriminated against Black voters, finding that their plan to include only one majority-Black district out of seven in a state where more than a quarter of residents are Black was “an intentional effort to dilute Black Alabamians’ voting strength.”
On Tuesday, in a late-night ruling, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority allowed Alabama to use the map anyway.
Citing “our colorblind Constitution,” the court’s conservative majority allowed the state to swap out its current map for one that eliminates a majority-Black district, likely giving an advantage to Republicans in their midterm race to hold onto a razor-thin House majority.
The decision to allow a map that had been struck down as “tainted by intentional race-based discrimination” by a lower court raised questions about when, if ever, the Supreme Court would invalidate a congressional map as racially discriminatory — and what role, if any, the justices believe federal courts should play in redistricting.
“The court just seems really hellbent on getting lower federal courts out of any policing of redistricting,” said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard and an election law expert.
For decades, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was understood by lower courts to protect minority voters — often Black voters in former slaveholding states in the South — from being split up in ways that diluted their voting power. It was through the power of court supervision, Stephanopoulos said, that majority Black districts became common throughout the former Confederacy.
The justices, in a 1986 ruling, laid out a multipart test to help determine whether a voting map diluted minority power in violation of the civil rights law.
That test, known as the “Gingles factors” for the name of the case, required complicated judgments about whether a map ultimately weakened the power of minority voters — regardless of a legislature’s goals when it drew the map.
Applying the Gingles test has been the job, for the most part, of federal judges, who have weighed more than 100 cases using the test since it was adopted.
But in a landmark decision in April striking down Louisiana’s voting map as an illegal racial gerrymander, the court’s six conservative justice overhauled the Gingles analysis, raising the bar on what is required to bring a successful claim.
They insisted that they were not unraveling the Voting Rights Act but merely setting out to “update the framework” of the law. From now on, the court ruled, plaintiffs — often Black voters and civil rights groups — would need to show evidence that lawmakers intentionally set out to disadvantage people based on race when they adopted a map.
The justices explained that courts would be able to find a violation under the Voting Rights Act but only if “the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.”
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What exactly does that mean? Alabama’s challenge provided the first hint of an answer.
On May 26, the three-judge panel in Alabama announced that it had reconsidered the map preferred by Republicans using the Supreme Court’s new standard and concluded that it must remain blocked, writing that it was, indeed, “tainted by intentional race-based discrimination,” violating both the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.
Cases that involve constitutional redistricting challenges like the one in the Alabama case are heard by special three-judge panels that include a mix of district and appeals judges.
In its decision on Tuesday, the Supreme Court’s majority rejected the lower court’s finding. An unsigned majority concluded that the three judges had failed to give proper deference to state lawmakers, what it called “the presumption of legislative good faith.”
The justices said that the lower court had incorrectly viewed “legal disagreement” by state lawmakers as “proof of discriminatory animus.”
Race and partisanship have closely tracked each other for decades. But the justices said that under their new standard, courts must disentangle the two and could step in only if race, not politics, was at play.
Analysts who cheered as well as those who criticized the ruling agreed that the justices were signaling that from now on lawmakers — not the courts — should be in the driver’s seat of redistricting.
“For too long, Alabama has been denied the full measure of its sovereignty by judges who insist on treating our state as though it never moved beyond the 1960s,” said Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall in a statement. “No more.”
Kareem Crayton, a Montgomery native and a vice president of the Brennan Center for Justice, called the deference to lawmakers“clarifying,” because the Supreme Court assuming legislators have acted in good faith “seems to cover any manner of thoughts and ills.”
The practical effect of the court’s decision is likely to be seen in declining racial diversity among elected leaders, said Pamela S. Karlan, a law professor at Stanford University and a former Justice Department official in Democratic administrations, as Republican lawmakers in the South target districts held by Black Democrats insisting they are doing so merely for partisan advantage.
“Now that they’ve decided that there’s just no problem at all in having mono-racial political delegations from the South, it’s likely that’s what we will start seeing,” Ms. Karlan said.
Richard L. Hasen, an election-law specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the decision also raised concerns because of the court’s willingness to jump into a redistricting dispute so close to an election.
Under what’s known as the Purcell principle, the Supreme Court has previously cautioned federal courts from changing election rules in the run-up to a contest over concerns of voter confusion.
Mr. Hasen said the court’s action in the Alabama case, taken with the other recent redistricting decisions, could be perceived as a willingness to act at “breakneck speed” — and of a partisan bent. All three of the court’s liberal justices dissented from the Alabama ruling.
“It’s hard to avoid the impression that the Republican-appointed justices are helping the Republican Party when every single ruling leading up to the election is going the Republicans way,” Mr. Hasen said.
Representative Shomari Figures, the Black Democrat who became Alabama’s second Black member of the House in 2024 when the state used a map including two majority Black districts, said Wednesday that he plans to run from a redrawn district.
But he denounced the ruling, declaring the Voting Rights Act essentially dead.
“As much as they may want to say that they didn’t overturn the Voting Rights Act, they’ve essentially nullified it and made it impossible to prove,” he said.
Emily Cochrane contributed reporting.
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