Federal court rules Alabama map still illegal even after Supreme Court’s Louisiana ruling

Alabama Republicans are heading back to the Supreme Court yet again, after a three-judge panel that included two Trump appointees ruled against the state’s congressional redistricting effort ahead of the midterm elections.  

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The panel rendered its latest ruling Tuesday in response to an order from the high court earlier this month, which directed the panel to reconsider its previous action against the state. The justices split 6-3 along party lines in ordering that second look in light of the court’s April ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, where the justices split 6-3 along those same lines in making it harder to bring claims under the Voting Rights Act.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor led the Democratic appointees in dissent from the order for further review in the Alabama litigation. She argued there was “no reason” for it because the lower court had previously found not only a Voting Rights Act violation but a direct violation of the Constitution via intentional discrimination against Black voters. “That constitutional finding of intentional discrimination is independent of, and unaffected by, any of the legal issues discussed in Callais,” Sotomayor wrote May 11. She added that sending the case back for further review “will cause only confusion as Alabamians begin to vote” in the state’s congressional primaries.

In its latest ruling Tuesday, the panel was mindful of the “very tight timeline” it was forced to rule on,

noting that it was two and a half months ahead of Alabama’s scheduled special primaries and some five months before the general election. But the judges concluded that they “cannot see our way clear to requiring Alabamians to cast their votes in the 2026 elections under a districting plan tainted by intentional race-based discrimination.” The panel rejected the state’s argument that Callais upended the intentional discrimination finding. In any event, the panel said, the Black voters in this case would likely separately satisfy the Supreme Court’s new Voting Rights Act test in Callais.

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Jordan Rubin

Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.

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• Federal court rules Alabama map still illegal even after Supreme Court’s Louisiana ruling