Alabama Redistricting Battle Is Back at SCOTUS,

As PinkState reported, in 2023, a district court three-judge panel blocked the use of 2023 maps drawn by the Alabama legislature and compelled them to draw a second majority-minority district. After the Supreme Court of the United States’ resolution in Louisiana v. Callais, Alabama petitioned for redress of this ruling, and SCOTUS vacated the district court resolution in early May, sending it back to the district court to review the case. 

On Tuesday, this same three-judge panel once again blocked the use of 2023 maps on the same foundation: that the maps are intentionally discriminatory and violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The district court panel claims they’re striving to forestall confusion among the voters. However, their refusal to apply the latest SCOTUS ruling to decide this case has bred more confusion than maps that change two districts.

As projected, on Wednesday, Alabama attorney common Steve Marshall filed an software for an emergency keep with SCOTUS, which might permit the state to still use the 2023 maps. 

Alabama’s Solicitor General A. Barrett Bowdre offered the transient: 

In its submitting on Wednesday, Alabama urged the court to freeze the decrease court’s ruling and permit it to use the 2023 map in the upcoming elections. That map, Bowdre wrote, “addressed this Court’s concerns about the State’s prioritization of core retention” – the precept of attempting to have districts resemble their earlier iterations as carefully as attainable – “at the cost of splitting the Black Belt region,” an space in central Alabama initially named for its wealthy, darkish soil but now named for its large Black population, the descendants of previously enslaved people. The 2023 map, Bowdre said, divided the Black Belt “as little as possible, while also keeping together the Gulf Coast as the State had done for 50 years.”

As said in Alabama Map Fight Erupts Again As Federal Panel Defies SCOTUS Momentum, the district court’s interpretation comes off as utter nonsense. Either maps are being drawn without racial specs, or they don’t seem to be. 

“Callais,” Bowdre continued, “vindicates Alabama’s position on the lawfulness of the 2023 Plan, yet the district court decided in one week that Callais changed nothing.” The district court, Bowdre burdened, didn’t require the challengers to offer various maps that would obtain Alabama’s objectives while still sustaining two majority-Black districts, as the Supreme Court recommended it ought to have, and “[i]t did not matter to the district court that drawing an additional race-based district came at the cost of sacrificing communities of interest and pairing incumbents.”

“Worse,” Bowdre concluded, the district court’s conclusion that the state deliberately violated the Constitution rests on the thought “that Alabama intentionally discriminated by refusing to intentionally discriminate.”

Shorter, Bowdre is begging the court to make it make sense.

As said before, this makes little sense besides as a tactic to forestall the August 11 particular election from transferring ahead. The work of reassigning voters to new districts was scheduled to start on Wednesday, May 27. Last Friday, Alabama Director of Elections Jeff Elrod testified to the panel that the window for voter rolls to be unlocked can be between Wednesday, May 27, and Tuesday, June 2. This is an exceptionally tight window in which to work; thus, the state’s request for an administrative keep. 

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has purview over this Northern Alabama district court, so the petition for a keep ended up on his docket. 

On Wednesday afternoon, Justice Thomas issued his response but declined to immediately restore the use of the 2023 maps. Thomas did order the plaintiffs in this motion to reply to Alabama’s request by Monday, June 1, at 4:00 p.m. 

Justice Thomas declines to immediately restore Alabama’s 2023 congressional map, but orders VRA plaintiffs to reply to Alabama’s request by Monday, June 1st at 4pm.

Alabama requested a ruling from the Court by 10am on June 1st or as soon as attainable thereafter. https://t.co/S2h9nK2n6Z pic.twitter.com/JmSj02GbRX

— SCOTUS Wire (@scotus_wire) May 27, 2026

Read More: New: Alabama Is Free to Redraw Its Maps After SCOTUS Vacates District Court Ruling

Alabama Map Fight Erupts Again As Federal Panel Defies SCOTUS Momentum

What could weigh in Alabama’s favor is the amicus transient filed by the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. In it, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon and Solicitor General John Sauer argue that the district court is just not assessing the case with the newly established precedent of Callais in the forefront.

Another day, another great amicus transient filed by @AAGDhillon and SG John Sauer–this time supporting Alabama’s request to keep a deeply flawed order enjoining the State’s new congressional map. pic.twitter.com/PkwxdotMlC

— Jesus A. Osete (@JesusOseteDOJ) May 27, 2026

On remand, however, the district court promptly reinstated its pre-Callais injunction largely based on its pre-Callais reasoning. The court held that Alabama had engaged in intentional discrimination by declining to draw a second black alternative district that the court had earlier recommended was a required remedy for a Section 2 violation. And the court again held that Alabama had violated Section 2. Those holdings had been mistaken even before Callais and are indefensible after it.

With respect to intentional discrimination, the district court paid only lip service to its obligations to “disentangle race and politics” and to start “with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith.” Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, 602 U.S. 1, 6 (2024). The court disregarded Alabama’s indisputably partisan goals when the 2026 legislature selected to use the 2023 map for the upcoming midterms and when the 2023 legislature pursued incumbency safety.

Essentially, Dhillon and Sauer surmised the three-judge panel disparaged Alabama’s good religion intent, twisting it into an effort to be deliberately racist.

The district court instead concluded that Alabama must have meant to discriminate because it declined to draw a second black alternative district that the district court had signaled Section 2 required. But a State’s insistence on pursuing its partisan objectives in the face of an earlier Section 2 holding doesn’t someway make those partisan objectives racially discriminatory. The district court’s opposite holding flouts a central lesson of Callais: that the pre-Callais Section 2 customary improperly condemned the refusal to create extra majority-minority districts in conditions that didn’t even assist “a strong inference” of intentional discrimination. 146 S.Ct. at 1157; see id. at 1157-1161. In any event, Alabama sought in good religion to appropriate the disparate treatment of two communities of curiosity—the Gulf Coast and the Black Belt—that was the premise of this Court’s pre-Callais holding in Allen v.Milligan, 599 U.S. 1 (2023), that an earlier map violated Section 2. That legit effort to comply with this Court’s resolution can’t be moderately construed as racial discrimination, significantly in gentle of the presumption of good religion.

The district court’s resolution to reinstate its Section 2 holding despite Callais was tainted by the same errors. 

The court again failed to disentangle race and politics, ignored Alabama’s partisan objectives, and deemed illegitimate the State’s effort to protect the Gulf Coast group. The court also failed to maintain respondents to their burden to control for celebration affiliation in analyzing racial voting patterns, relying on a smattering of largely irrelevant pre-Callais findings. And the court used its flawed intentional-discrimination analysis to conclude that the totality of circumstances demonstrated seemingly intentional discrimination in violation of Section 2. 

For all intents and functions, the district court panel is ordering Alabama to violate the Constitution.

Thus, as in Callais, the court ordered a racial gerrymander, mandating a minority-opportunity district that the State never would have created based on its race-neutral districting ideas and political objectives. See 146 S. Ct. at 1161-1162; see also Malliotakis v.Williams, 146 S. Ct. 809, 810 (2026) (Alito, J., concurring in the grant of keep)

Dhillon and Sauer additional argued that the district court was appearing in unhealthy religion to disrupt an already established election. The district court didn’t keep in its lane in its attempt to dictate what would or wouldn’t be a burden to voters. 

Worse still, the district court issued its injunction deep into the election calendar—less than three months before the first and after the candidate-qualifying window had closed. The court excused that clear violation of Purcell v. Gonzalez, 549 U.S. 1 (2006) (per curiam), on the idea that Alabama had created the timing drawback by deciding to use the 2023 map only after Callais, even though the State acted as soon as it might once this Court vacated the prior injunction in gentle of Callais. But state legislatures are democratically elected our bodies that are competent to make the coverage judgments inherent in late election modifications and are accountable to the voters for any unwell results. Federal district courts do not need the same license to intervene with election guidelines at the eleventh hour, significantly on such doubtful deserves theories.

Pretty brutal. We will see what counterargument the plaintiffs in this case select to submit and what SCOTUS will determine to hopefully put this to mattress once and for all.  

Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will decide the destiny of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must keep control of both chambers of Congress.

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