A federal district court struck down the state’s new congressional map, calling it an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
Protesters hold signs in favor of black voting rights in front of the Supreme Court on October 15, 2025.
(Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images) The U.S. District Court in Alabama has decided not to let the state quietly return to the Jim Crow era as the Supreme Court would like. In a decision issued Tuesday, a panel of three judges, including two appointed by Donald Trump, rejected Alabama’s latest attempt to suppress black political power.
Alabama has already indicated it will file an emergency appeal. I am forced to assume that this appeal will be allowed and that the White Wing Supreme Court will overturn the lower court’s decision. But this decision remains a striking and categorical rejection of the racism that Republicans wish to reinject into American elections.
This case is only the latest in a long saga Allen v. Milligan. After the 2020 census, Alabama redrew the congressional map such that only one of its seven districts was majority-minority. The map deliberately diluted the voting power of Black Alabamans, particularly those living in the so-called “Black Belt,” which runs sideways across the state.
That map was challenged by voting rights activists who called on the state to draw a second majority-minority district. Alabama is 26 percent Black and 6 percent Latino, so having two of the seven majority-minority districts makes mathematical sense. Voting rights activists won in district court, but in February 2022 the Supreme Court ruled that the November 2022 midterm elections were too close to force Alabama to redraw its maps. The 2022 elections were held with just one majority-minority district.
In 2023, the Supreme Court took up the case again – this time to rule on the merits, not just the timing – and ruled that Alabama’s maps were racist and therefore unconstitutional. The Alabama Legislature then presented another map, which the district court calls the 2023 plan, which was essentially the same as the 2021 map that the Supreme Court had just rejected. The district court also rejected that 2023 plan and ordered a special master to draw a new map. This new map featured two majority-minority districts that kept black communities intact throughout the state.
The district court calls this map the “Special Master Map.” The 2024 elections were conducted under this map, and the 2026 midterm elections were expected to be conducted under the same map. But at the end of April, the Supreme Court handed down its judgment in Louisiana v. Callais. This case effectively killed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and allowed states to resurrect Jim Crow types of voter suppression, including gerrymandering of black voting power.
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Alabama whites immediately took action. The State interpreted Callis as canceling Allen v. Milliganand attempted to reinstate its card scheduled for 2023.
It was this map that the three-judge district court rejected, for the third time, on Tuesday. The court found that, even after Callisthe remaining fragment of the Voting Rights Act still prohibits intentionally racist maps, and the Alabama Legislature’s map intentionally seeks to take away voting power from black people. This is a conclusion that the Supreme Court itself reached when Milligan was decided and the district court saw nothing in the record to suggest a different conclusion. Instead, the district court ordered Alabama to continue using the special primary map, which was two majority and minority constituencies, for the next elections.
Part of what’s going on here is that white Republicans in Alabama are fickle and lazy. Their card has been found to be intentionally racist by several courts on several occasions. Trying to navigate this particular map is the worst possible version of I’m trying to make recovery happen.. Could Alabama draw a map with just one black district in a way that the courts would approve? Probably! Once again, there is two The Trump judges are on this same district court, and it’s not really difficult to get the Trump judges to greenlight racism. But trying again and again to get the courts to uphold an old map that has already been ruled unconstitutional borders on insanity.
Then again, even if Alabama doesn’t have a good legal argument for using its old, unconstitutional map, it arguably has something more important: a Supreme Court that might be so desperate to crush black voting rights that the legal arguments don’t matter.
To understand how the court might maneuver this, it helps to know a legal doctrine invented by the court to help it generate the results it desires: the Purcell principle. At its core, this doctrine states that changes to election rules (such as, for example, existing districts) cannot be made “too close” to an upcoming election. How close is too close? Only the Supreme Court knows. In 2022, the Supreme Court used this principle to enforce the racist card that Alabama now wants to use, and it may well do so again.
It will depend on which map the Supreme Court decides to use as the “current” map and, therefore, which party it thinks is trying to change the rules. The district court argued in its ruling that the special primary map was the legitimate map because the election was scheduled to take place under that map until several weeks ago; in this logic, Alabama is trying to change the rules. Alabama, however, is likely to argue in its appeal to the Supreme Court that the intended map, the one that was not supposed to be used in this election, is the current map because the Legislature voted after the vote. Callis decision to try again. Who will be right? Well, obviously the district court is right. We know this because the candidates are literally already involved in primary contests based on the special trump card. We are well past the time when the state should be able to change its district boundaries.
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But the Supreme Court is apparently happy to ignore its Purcell Principle every chance it gets to take away black people’s right to vote. Just a few weeks ago, it was literally rejected the traditional 32-day waiting period who should have followed the Callis decision just so states could quickly remove black power – which several states quickly did. Louisiana canceled primaries altogether so it could erase black districts before the midterm elections. Tennessee divided the city of Memphis so it could eliminate the state’s only black district.
I expect the Supreme Court to continue its racist streak when it rules on this case. I hope he upholds the lower court’s decision, citing Purcell, and allows Alabama to conduct the 2026 midterm elections with his racist map. Perhaps in 2027, the Supreme Court will reject the map again and force Alabama to do the seemingly back-breaking work of drawing a map. new racist card. But since the current Supreme Court’s operational goal appears to be to help Republicans retain the House in 2026, it will likely govern for Alabama in the short term.
The only hope here is that Chief Justice John Roberts and alleged rapist Brett Kavanaugh or Amy Coney Barrett are offense by pure Alabama laziness. They have already rejected the Alabama Legislature map, calling it intentionally racist. To allow it now, they would essentially have to admit they were wrong. And such an admission would encourage states to ignore future Supreme Court rulings, on the grounds that adverse rulings are only temporary setbacks.
The district court brought this issue to the forefront in its decision. The panel wrote:
Alabama cannot use Callis to legitimize his pre-Callis decision to double down on the discriminatory vote dilution that we and the Supreme Court have found.… If such retroactive validation strategies were available, states would be encouraged to govern themselves according to what they think federal law should be, not what it is.
We know Roberts hates black voting rights. But we also know that he loves power. Is he willing to sacrifice the second to accomplish the first? I guess we’ll find out soon.
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Elie Mystal Elie Mystal is The Nationjustice correspondent and columnist. He is also an Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author of two books: New York Times bestseller Let me respond: A Guide to the Constitution for Black Men And Bad Laws: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining Americaboth published by The New Press. You can subscribe to his Nation newsletter “Elie c. US » here.
