The ripple effects from the Supreme Court’s April 29 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, in which the justices struck down Louisiana’s congressional map, made their way to the court for the first time on Friday afternoon. In a 25-page filing, Alabama asked the court to clear the way for it to use a congressional map that it had adopted in 2023, which has one majority-Black district, rather than a court-ordered map that has two such districts. Alabama Solicitor General A. Barrett Bowdre told the justices that otherwise the state would have to “hold elections under a map that was erroneously ordered at best and unconstitutional at worst. Nothing requires that result,” Bowdre concluded. “Americans, no less in Alabama, deserve a republic free of racial sorting now, and state officials deserve an opportunity to give it to them.”
The filing is the latest chapter in a long-running dispute over Alabama’s congressional map. In 2021, in Allen v. Milligan, a divided Supreme Court agreed that the congressional map that the state had adopted in 2021 violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by diluting the votes of Black voters – specifically, by packing many of the state’s Black voters into a single district in central Alabama and then dispersing other Black voters in the region, known as the “Black Belt,” into several other districts, where they did not make up a majority.
After the court’s decision in Allen v. Milligan, Alabama adopted a new map. But a federal district court then blocked the use of the 2023 map, which had only one majority-Black district, holding that it discriminated against Black voters. The court ordered the state to use a map with a second majority-Black district.
The state then went to the Supreme Court, which had waited to act on Alabama’s appeals until after it issued its ruling in Callais. Alabama has asked the justices to fast-track their consideration of those appeals, but it notes the justices are not scheduled to issue orders from their next private conference until Monday, May 18, just one day before the state’s primary election is supposed to take place. Therefore, it argues, at a minimum the court should pause the lower-court orders barring the state from using the 2023 map.
Alabama contends that its “case mirrors Louisiana’s, and they should end the same way: with this year’s elections run with districts based on lawful policy goals, not race.” When it drew the 2023 map, Alabama said, it sought to “achiev[e] the State’s neutral goals (like protecting incumbents) and refus[ed] to let race predominate.” As a practical matter, it asserts, it “compl[ied] with Callais before Callais,” prompting the lower court to strike down the 2023 map.
Now, Alabama explains, the state’s Legislature has held a special session and is ready to pass a bill that would reinstate the 2023 map. It should have the chance to do so, just as Louisiana has, the state concludes.
The state acknowledges that “election day in Alabama is fast approaching. But the legislature is currently addressing,” it says, “whether election deadlines could be shifted to conduct special elections under the 2023 Plan if the injunction is promptly lifted. If Alabamians can have an election free of racially sorted congressional districts,” the state writes, “they should have the opportunity.”
Justice Clarence Thomas, who fields emergency requests from the area that includes Alabama, directed the challengers in the case to respond to the state’s request by Monday, May 11, at 5 p.m. EDT.