Supreme Court paves way for Alabama to remove blue district
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The U.S. Supreme Court has paved the way for Alabama to change congressional maps for this year's midterm elections.
Why it matters: The move is likely to flip one seat in the House of Representatives from blue to red, and may lead to a full redistricting effort that could flip two seats.
The latest: In a 6-3 decision Monday, the Supreme Court lifted lower-court injunctions that blocked Alabama's 2023 congressional maps and imposed court-drawn maps that were set to be in place until after the 2030 Census.
Driving the news: The Alabama Legislature wrapped up a special session May 8, resulting in bills to reinstate the 2023 maps for this year's election, and redo primary elections in the affected districts: 1, 2 and 7.
- The Alabama legislature passed two bills during the session last week to pave the way for special primary elections in case the court lifted the injunctions.
- The Supreme Court's decision means the three pending redistricting cases are headed back to district court to be evaluated under the new standard.
What they're saying: Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elana Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, saying the earlier cases rested on the Fourteenth Amendment, not the Voting Rights Act.
- Sotomayor, in citing the 2023 redistricting process and court cases that resulted in the court-ordered maps due to the Fourteenth Amendment, writes, "Alabama made an intentional choice to perpetuate and entrench, rather than remedy and uproot, the racial discrimination that the District Court had previously found and that this Court had affirmed."
- "Nothing in the District Court's Fourteenth Amendment analysis is affected by this court's opinion in Callais," Sotomayor writes. "It said not a word about the standard for Fourteenth Amendment intentional-discrimination claims."
Catch up quick: Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall filed the emergency motions on April 30, asking SCOTUS to lift lower-court injunctions that blocked the state from using 2023 maps.
- In a release, Marshall said "the injunctions cannot survive the court's ruling ... in Louisiana v. Callais."
- He told Axios May 1 that previous litigation under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, "conflated race and politics in a way (that's) now not allowed."
Context: Alabama's redistricting efforts are part of a larger GOP push to redraw maps across the South in the wake of the Callais ruling, including in Tennessee and Louisiana.