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A federal court in Alabama on Tuesday , yet again, that the state had illegally discriminated against Black voters in drawing its congressional map. The decision, issued by a three-judge district court that included two Donald Trump appointees, comes after the Supreme Court had sprinted to side with Alabama Republicans two weeks ago in light of its debilitation of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais. This right-leaning lower court’s thundering, exasperated decision shows just how obvious Alabama’s Jim Crow–style discrimination has been over the past few years. And it will force SCOTUS to either draw the line at overtly racist gerrymandering or admit that it has declared open season on Black Americans’ political representation.
Alabama has one of the largest Black populations of any state. And the VRA requires that racial minorities be given an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. But after the 2020 census, the Alabama Legislature has been on a tear trying to silence Black voices by breaking up compact minority-heavy districts around cities and spreading those populations across white rural areas. And the state’s voters have been in court trying to fight for equal representation ever since. These cases have gone before a three-judge district court made up of Judges Anna Manasco and Terry Moorer, both Trump appointees, along with Judge Stanley Marcus, an appointee first of Ronald Reagan, then Bill Clinton. In other words, these are not the types of judges you would expect to look for reasons to distinguish or defy Supreme Court orders. Instead, it is only Alabama’s blatantly racist illegal actions that compelled the panel to reach its repeated rulings that the state is engaged in race-based discrimination.
These judges first found that the Legislature had violated Section 2 of the VRA by diluting Black representation in 2022, after which Alabama went to the Supreme Court and lost in . In a 2023 opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, he explained that the map the state had created was an illegal scheme specifically designed to eliminate Alabama’s second majority-minority district. The state then tried to ignore the high court’s ruling: Having been told by multiple courts that its maps were illegal for having only one majority-Black congressional district, it then created a slightly different map, which still included only one such district. The same three-judge court again set aside Alabama’s efforts, this time appointing an independent judge and cartographer to make a map that preserved the preexisting precincts without regard to race, a strategy that naturally led to the retention of two minority congressional districts. Early voting started under the court-ordered restored map in March of this year.
Then, on April 29, Callais came down. In an underhanded decision, the Supreme Court drastically rewrote the VRA in much of the same terms that Alabama had wished for back in 2023, repealing the federal requirement that states give fair representation to Black and brown voters. But in doing so, the court swore up and down that its Louisiana decision did not overrule Allen v. Milligan or remove safeguards against intentional racial discrimination in voting. That lie held for all of 12 days, when SCOTUS then the Alabama court’s 268-page opinion finding unconstitutional intentional discrimination and told the court to reconsider its findings “in light of Callais.” Within hours, Alabama tried to order a new primary under a gerrymandered map.
Tasked yet again with considering the Alabama maps, the district court was compelled by the rule of law to strike them down. On the facts, it explained that “the Legislature knew that to dilute the Black vote, it could crack the Black population in South Alabama by submerging much of the Black Belt in one majority-White district while simultaneously submerging Black voters in Mobile in a separate majority-White district.” On the law, the court noted that the Supreme Court in Callais had not addressed whatsoever the constitutional guarantee against discrimination under the 14th Amendment, which was an independent basis for the court’s ruling outside the VRA. The court therefore found that even after Callais, the state’s maps are illegal.
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“Alabama,” the court pointedly observed, “cannot use Callais to legitimize its pre-Callais decision to double down on the discriminatory vote dilution that we and the Supreme Court found. And it cannot use Callais to legitimize the series of specific and unusual decisions it made to entrench that dilution.” After all, “if such retroactive validation strategies were available,” then “states would be encouraged to govern themselves according to what they think federal law ought to be, not what it is.” This warning seems aimed squarely at the Supreme Court: If the justices let Alabama get away with this, they won’t merely dilute Black representation; they’ll diminish the court’s own power too.
It is important to emphasize how cynically strategic the entire Alabama state government’s coordination has been in its attempt to disenfranchise Black Alabamians. Start with the Legislature—which, the court pointed out, engaged in plainly discriminatory behavior, including selectively calling “experts” who favored white, Republican-benefiting maps and biased historians who ignored the history of Black Alabamians in particular districts. State Attorney General Steve Marshall is part of this scheme too: When SCOTUS announced that it would rehear Callais last year, Marshall could have asked the district court for a stay in light of the VRA’s obviously imminent demise. Instead, Alabama—worried it might lose—lay in wait until after Callais came down. Then Gov. Kay Ivey canceled the state’s primary, which had been scheduled for May 19, and called a special session so the Legislature could try yet again to gerrymander the Black opportunity district out of existence. By that point, mail voting had already begun, and in-person voting was 20 days away.
This time crunch helped the district court defuse another issue at hand: the so-called Purcell principle, which the Supreme Court sporadically invokes to keep federal courts from changing voting rules too close to an election. SCOTUS’s chief justification for this principle is that it guards against administrative chaos and confusion for voters and candidates. But here, the court noted, preserving the former map would not “worsen” chaos or confusion; rather, it would “lessen it” by restoring “the well-established status quo.” The court’s injunction “simply keeps the candidates and the voters in the districts they have been in for nearly three years,” sparing election officials the “enormously disruptive” scramble of reassigning them to new districts and administering the election under a brand-new map. The state’s director of elections even acknowledged that keeping the old map would “avoid the confusion and error risk attendant” compared to adopting the last-minute gerrymandered maps, which would be a “costly,” “chaotic, decentralized, and Herculean effort.” So the concerns that motivate Purcell counsel against Alabama and in favor of enjoining the state’s newly gerrymandered maps.
The court also made a subtler point about the fundamental unfairness inherent in invoking Purcell to preserve the state’s new, racist map. When SCOTUS cleared the way for Alabama to take another stab at redistricting, one group of plaintiffs filed for a new restraining order within just six hours. Two others filed the next morning. “No one has delayed,” the court wrote—except the state itself, which waited until the last minute to speed-run a racial gerrymander over the finish line. Wielding Purcell to punish the plaintiffs and reward the defendants would be perverse in a case like this, giving lawmakers an incentive to unveil racist voting laws at the eleventh hour, then insist that there’s not enough time for courts to block them.
Unfortunately, that is exactly how the Supreme Court has weaponized Purcell in the past. And the Republican-appointed justices have given us every reason to fear they’ll do the same in the future; they were, of course, the ones who got the ball rolling by dropping Callais in the midst of a redistricting war. Alabama is already appealing Tuesday’s decision to the Supreme Court and has vowed to seek an emergency stay; although the right-wing justices may well grant it, they cannot feign ignorance toward the profound injustice and bad faith of their actions. The district court has now laid out, in the starkest terms, the stakes of this case for voting rights, racial equality, and judicial authority. All will be badly damaged if Alabama secures permission from SCOTUS to eliminate yet another diverse district by enacting a racial gerrymander. And Callais’ assurances—that it neither overturned precedent nor blessed intentional racism—will be exposed as a cynical fiction that could not survive its first test.
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