The plaintiffs challenging an Alabama congressional map urged the justices on Monday afternoon to leave in place a ruling by a panel of federal judges that bars Alabama from using the map on the ground that it is racially discriminatory. One set of plaintiffs told the justices that the lower court “made findings on a full record that remains the definitive account of Alabama’s racial geography, racialized politics, and racially discriminatory policymaking.”
The filing came five days after Alabama asked the Supreme Court to put that ruling, issued on May 26, on hold and allow it to use the map in the 2026 elections. A. Barrett Bowdre, Alabama’s solicitor general, told the justices last week that if the state cannot use its map, “voters will be forced to vote under a court-drawn racially gerrymandered map that does not meet Alabama’s legitimate districting goals.”
The dispute over Alabama’s map began five years ago but gained new momentum since the Supreme Court’s April 29 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, in which the court – by a vote of 6-3 – struck down a map that created a second majority-Black district in the state, but which a group of voters who described themselves as “non-African American” argued was the product of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. More broadly, the court’s decision also made it harder for plaintiffs to prevail on a claim that a map violates a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.
While the court considered the Louisiana case, it had put off acting on petitions for review filed by Alabama, seeking review of a federal court’s ruling that a congressional map that the state had adopted in 2023 violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bars racial discrimination in voting. (The state had adopted the 2023 map after a federal court ruled that an earlier map, adopted in 2021, likely violated Section 2. The Supreme Court upheld that decision in 2023.) Specifically, that court concluded that the map was “an intentional effort to dilute Black Alabamians’ voting strength and evade the unambiguous requirements of court orders standing in the way.” A court-appointed special master ultimately created a new map, which the lower court ordered the state to use in future elections.
On May 11, one week before Alabama’s primary election was scheduled to take place, the justices sent the case back to the lower court for it to reconsider its ruling in light of Callais. Just three days before that, the Alabama Legislature had passed a law allowing “a special primary election for affected Congressional districts” if a federal court permits the state to restore the 2023 map.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the court’s order, in an opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. In her view, there was “no reason” for the court to send the case back to the lower court because that court had also concluded that “Alabama violated the Fourteenth Amendment by intentionally diluting the votes of Black voters in Alabama. That constitutional finding of intentional discrimination is independent of,” she wrote, “and unaffected by, any of the legal issues discussed in Callais.”
When the case returned to the lower courts, a panel of federal judges again prohibited the state from using the map, finding that it “intentionally discriminated based on race in violation of the Constitution” and therefore could not stand even after the Supreme Court’s decision in Callais. Instead, the lower court ruled, Alabama should use the map created by the special master.
Alabama then returned to the Supreme Court on May 27, again asking the justices to intervene. “Callais,” the state contended, “vindicates Alabama’s position on the lawfulness of the 2023 Plan, yet the district court decided in one week that Callais changed nothing.” Alabama asked the Supreme Court to temporarily pause the lower court’s ruling while it considered the state’s request – an order known as an administrative stay – and to act by 10 a.m. on Monday, June 1. Instead, Justice Clarence Thomas, who has responsibility for emergency appeals from the 11th Circuit, which includes Alabama, directed the challengers to respond by 4 p.m. on June 1.
The Trump administration filed a “friend of the court” brief supporting Alabama. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that the district court’s order barring the state from using the 2023 map came too late. Sauer reasoned that “state legislatures are democratically elected bodies that are competent to make the policy judgments inherent in late election changes and are accountable to the voters for any ill effects. Federal district courts,” by contrast, “do not have the same license to interfere with election rules at the eleventh hour, particularly on such dubious merits theories.”
Moreover, Sauer contended, Alabama is ultimately likely to prevail on the merits – a key criterion in determining whether to grant temporary relief – because the lower court wrongly “treated Alabama’s failure to draw a second black opportunity district as proof of intentional racial discrimination, notwithstanding the obvious alternative explanations for Alabama’s actions: helping Republicans and protecting the Gulf Coast community of interest.”
In their briefs on Monday afternoon, the challengers insisted that it is too late for the court to intervene now. “Reassigning voters for a special primary election on August 11, 2026, is administratively impossible at this point,” argued one group of challengers, led by Bobby Singleton, a Democratic state senator. A second group of challengers, known as the Caster challengers, made up of voters from three different congressional districts, added that “mere hours remain until Alabama’s statewide voter registration records must be cemented in place for the 2026 elections” – a task complicated, the Singleton challengers noted, by the fact that offices in Alabama are closed on Monday, June 1, to observe the birthday of Jefferson Davis.
But in any event, the Caster challengers told the justices, the Supreme Court’s “decision in Callais did nothing to change the facts of this case.” Unlike in Callais, they wrote, Alabama is not alleging that partisanship played a role in drawing the 2023 map. Instead, they said, Alabama “adamantly insisted” that it drew its map to “preserve the predominantly White Gulf Coast community,” making a second majority-Black district “mathematically impossible.” But in fact, they continued, Alabama’s map for its state board of education elections “splits the Gulf Coast in the very same way that Alabama claims is ‘non-negotiable.’”
A third group of challengers, known as the Milligan challengers, which includes a Birmingham non-profit and the Alabama Conference of the NAACP, stressed that the lower court’s order barring the state from using the 2023 map “rests on an independent finding that Alabama intentionally discriminated against Black voters in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” By contrast, the Milligan challengers argued, Callais addressed racial gerrymandering “but said nothing about the analytically distinct claim of intentional race discrimination here.”
Alabama will have the opportunity to file a reply to the challengers’ briefs. Once that reply has been submitted, the justices could act on the state’s request at any time.
