The state had argued that the high court’s recent ruling on race and redistricting required it to adjust its electoral map.
The U.S. Supreme Court late on May 11 cleared the way for Alabama to redraw its congressional election map to comply with the court’s landmark ruling limiting the use of race in redistricting.
The court’s new decision took the form of a brief, unsigned order.
The Supreme Court vacated lower court rulings that required Alabama to use a congressional map that included two majority-black districts out of the state’s seven districts.
The justices waived the usual waiting period and ordered that the new ruling take effect immediately.
Alabama and several other GOP-led states are currently in the process of an unusual mid-decade redistricting they hope will help Republicans retain control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the November elections.
The high court ruled last month in Louisiana v. Callais that race may be only a minor factor in redistricting rationales, not the predominant, overriding reason for how congressional district lines are drawn.
Federal courts had been incorrectly applying the Supreme Court precedents on the federal Voting Rights Act’s Section 2 nondiscrimination provisions “in a way that forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids,” the high court said in the Callais ruling.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall praised the new ruling, which he said “vindicated the state’s long held position” that the state should not have to draw electoral maps “around race.”
“For too long, unelected federal judges have had more say over Alabama’s elections than Alabama’s voters. That ended today,” Marshall said in a video posted on X.
“My job in this office was to put the legislature in the best possible legal position to draw a congressional map that favors Republicans, seven to zero,” he added.
Election attorney J. Christian Adams, president and general counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, questioned whether Alabama may lawfully draw a map with no black-majority districts.
There is “no way in my view Alabama could have zero without violating the Voting Rights Act,” he told The Epoch Times.
