By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON, May 11 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way on Monday for Alabama Republicans to pursue a congressional voting map more favorable to their party ahead of November’s midterm elections, the latest fallout from the court’s seismic voting rights ruling.
The justices lifted a lower court’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-member court’s conservative majority. The three liberal justices dissented and suggested that the lower court could reapply its judicial block to the Alabama Republicans’ preferred map.
President Donald 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 the Supreme Court’s ruling undercutting a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. Black voters tend to support Democratic candidates.
In its landmark April 29 ruling, the court, in a 6-3 decision 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 the Supreme Court’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 been ordered by a lower court to use a map that includes two majority-Black districts out of seven. Both are held by Black Democrats.
The lower court decided that a prior map had intentionally discriminated against Black voters and unlawfully diluted their voting power.
Alabama officials had argued in Supreme Court filings that Alabama’s court-ordered map shared the same constitutional defects as Louisiana’s.
Alabama’s Republican Attorney General Steve Marshall in a social media post called Monday’s order a “major victory at the U.S. Supreme Court.”
“For too long, unelected federal judges have had more say over Alabama’s elections than Alabama’s voters,” Marshall wrote. “That ended today.”
Deuel Ross, a lawyer at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund who represents a group of plaintiffs in the case, said his clients were “deeply disappointed that the Supreme Court has temporarily cleared the way for Alabama to use an intentionally discriminatory map.”
“The court’s decision interferes with the ongoing election and puts the validity of the votes of thousands of early voters into doubt,” Ross said. “We will consider all of our options to reinstate the court-ordered map and protect the rights of voters.”
DISSENT SUGGESTS LOWER COURT CAN AGAIN BLOCK NEW MAP
In a dissent, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor emphasized that the lower court’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 lower court’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 lower court “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 the court’s April 29 decision, called Louisiana v. Callais.
In 2023, the court had upheld the lower court’s decision that the state’s Republican-drawn electoral map diluted Black 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 the court’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.
(Reporting by John Kruzel with additional reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Nia Williams and Stephen Coates)
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