For the second time in three weeks, the Roberts Court backed an Alabama congressional map a lower court had found was intentionally designed to dilute Black voters’ power. In a four-page unsigned ruling late Tuesday night, the Supreme Court reversed a unanimou
On Tuesday night. late enough that most of Alabama was already living in the quiet between one election calendar and the next. the Supreme Court’s Republican majority gave Alabama Republicans the green light again. The justices reinstated a congressional map that a lower federal court had repeatedly said intentionally discriminates against Black voters—an outcome that is expected to erase Black representation from more of the state’s seats.
The decision landed as the conflict over Alabama’s lines is already steeped in timing and frustration. Black voters make up 27 percent of Alabama’s population. but under the congressional map Alabama Republicans adopted after the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling. Black voters can expect to elect a candidate of choice in just one of the state’s seven congressional districts.
That map is the same one that has been challenged for violating the Constitution and diluting Black voting strength. Last week. after the Supreme Court told the lower court to take another look of the case in light of Callais. a three-judge panel—two of whose judges were appointed by President Donald Trump—blocked the map for the November election. In a unanimous opinion. the judges said they could not require Alabamians to cast votes in the 2026 elections under a plan tainted by intentional race-based discrimination.
“Ultimately, we cannot see our way clear to requiring Alabamians to cast their votes in the 2026 elections under a districting plan tainted by intentional race-based discrimination,” the judges wrote.
The Supreme Court overturned that ruling in a four-page unsigned opinion released late Tuesday night, siding with Alabama Republicans and rejecting the lower court’s conclusion that the legislature acted with discriminatory intent.
The justices said the three-judge court “did not heed the presumption of legislative good faith. ” a standard the Supreme Court essentially made up two years ago to shield GOP gerrymanders from racial gerrymandering claims. The federal panel. in contrast. found that the Alabama legislature had clearly acted in bad faith by deliberating evading court orders in an effort to create a second majority-Black district.
The Supreme Court also claimed the lower court failed to follow the new standards for evaluating racial gerrymandering claims set out in Callais. In Callais. the court wrote that Section 2 of the Act. properly interpreted. imposes liability only when circumstances create a “strong inference” that intentional discrimination occurred. But the lower court’s latest opinion did exactly what Alabama had been accused of avoiding: it concluded unconstitutional vote dilution had occurred in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment—finding intentional discrimination.
Then came another justification that drew sharp reaction from Justice Sonia Sotomayor in dissent.
The majority opinion said the lower court improperly “interposed itself into Alabama’s ongoing efforts to conduct its imminent 2026 congressional elections.” The majority pointed to the idea that federal courts should not impose changes close to an election. even though the Supreme Court itself reinstated Alabama’s map one week before the primaries. That reinstatement. according to the account in the ruling’s wake. led to widespread confusion. with votes cast during early voting being tossed.
The Supreme Court’s own rule, as described in the dispute, will allow states to issue last-minute election changes that disenfranchise voters while limiting the ability of federal courts to intervene.
In her dissent, Sotomayor argued the damage went beyond the map itself. “In addition to being wrong on the merits. the Court’s decision inflicts two grave harms on the public. ” she wrote. She said it “debases the democratic process by upending Alabama’s entire election in the name of permitting Alabama to discriminate against Black Alabamians.” She also said it “corrodes the rule of law by rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship and outright defiance of court orders.”.
In the short term, the effect is political: the ruling hands Republicans another seat heading into November. But the stakes described by critics extend far beyond one state line.
Tuesday’s decision adds to a pattern—set in motion by the Supreme Court only weeks earlier—of speeding up how and when states can redraw maps in ways that favor Republican gains and reduce Black representation in the South. The Supreme Court issued Callais in late April rather than June, departing from the customary timing for major rulings. That earlier release gave Republican-controlled states enough time to redraw their maps quickly. and southern states including Tennessee. Alabama. and Louisiana passed new maps that removed Black representation in Congress.
The timeline around Callais also became part of the broader dispute about fairness in election-season intervention. After Callais. the conservative majority struck down the creation of a second-majority-Black district in Louisiana just three weeks before the state’s primary. The ruling arrived while mail voting was underway and 45,000 voters had already cast ballots. Rather than waiting the standard month to certify the decision, the court put Callais into effect immediately. That move allowed Republican Gov. Jeff Landry to suspend Louisiana’s House primaries so the legislature could eliminate one of two majority-Black districts.
Days after that Louisiana intervention, Alabama’s own showdown with the federal courts took a similar form. The conservative justices allowed Alabama to put in place a new Congressional map—also backed by the ruling again on Tuesday—after mail voting had begun. The court sided with Alabama Republicans just one week before the primary, eliminating one of the state’s majority-Black districts.
The result, critics say, is a Supreme Court that uses last-minute decisions to produce political outcomes it prefers—and does so while invoking rules that, in practice, limit the ability of lower courts to stop these changes.
In the Alabama case. the dissent and critics emphasize that the Supreme Court’s Tuesday ruling goes beyond what Callais said it would allow. The account here notes that Callais said it was not overturning the 2023 Allen v. Milligan decision that led to Alabama creating a second majority-Black district. But on the shadow docket, critics argue, the Supreme Court has effectively done just that.
A similar contradiction is described in how intent is evaluated under the Voting Rights Act. Callais. the text says. set a standard that districts can be challenged only when there is evidence of intentional discrimination by the map’s makers—an almost impossible bar. Yet the Alabama three-judge panel, after reconsideration, found that evidence of intentional discrimination still dominated. The panel wrote that it did not lightly intrude in state affairs. but that its review of undisputed evidence left it no doubt that Alabama’s legislatively enacted plan—the “2023 Plan”—intentionally discriminated based on race in violation of the Constitution. The judges said re-examination in light of Callais yielded the same conclusion.
The Supreme Court, on Tuesday, reversed that determination without grappling with the panel’s extensive findings.
Deuel Ross, Director of Litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, summarized the concern in direct terms: “The Supreme Court’s decision gives cover to Alabama and others to deliberately and openly discriminate against Black voters without fear of any consequence.”
Chief Justice John Roberts. in defending the institution. may insist the justices are not “political actors.” But the dissent and critics point to timing and outcomes over the course of the past month alone. arguing the court wants to build a world in which there will be no Black House members from the South and Democrats have no realistic chance to retake control of Congress.
Sotomayor’s dissent ends with a charge that goes to the legitimacy of the process itself. After today, she wrote, it is hard to call Alabama’s “cynical gambit” anything other than a success—and the court’s rewarding of Alabama’s behavior anything other than a blow to the rule of law.
For voters. the practical meaning is immediate: another Supreme Court reversal. another narrowing of representation. and another election cycle shaped—at least according to critics by the record of these decisions—by the court’s willingness to intervene at the edge of timing and the limits of judicial restraint.
Alabama congressional map Roberts Court gerrymandering Black voters Voting Rights Act Louisiana v. Callais Allen v. Milligan Sonia Sotomayor NAACP Legal Defense Fund Jeff Landry 2026 elections U.S. House