The Supreme Court showed beyond a doubt Tuesday that it will never again put a stop to Republican states snuffing out the Black vote.
The six right-wing justices granted Alabama’s request for a stay, which clears the way for the state to hold its 2026 elections under a 2023 map crafted to deliver Republicans six congressional seats and Democrats only one. It does so by making Black Alabamians’ votes count for less than white ones’.
In Louisiana v. Callais, the Court made vote dilution nearly impossible to prove. It ignored Congress’ alterations to the Voting Rights Act and turned it back into an intents test, where the plaintiffs had to make the extremely difficult showing that the legislators intended to discriminate based on race. And yet, in the Alabama case, the plaintiffs managed to do that. The district court found plentiful evidence that the state intentionally discriminated after the court had previously ordered it to produce a map with two districts composed of a Black majority or near-majority, and Alabama flatly ignored it. The state instead produced another map with only one Black-majority district.
That evidence, rare in its unambiguity, still failed at the Supreme Court.
“As to intentional vote dilution, the District Court did not heed the presumption of legislative good faith because it interpreted the State’s legal disagreement with the court’s earlier remedial order as proof of discriminatory animus,” the majority wrote.
In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the Court’s order proves that “there is no realistic case in which the presumption of legislative good faith can ever be rebutted.” It also, she added, “corrodes the rule of law by rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship and outright defiance of court orders.”
The majority then delivers the death blow to any attempt to stop red states from suppressing the Black vote.
“Under Callais, the District Court was required to deny relief unless the plaintiffs’ alternative map performed ‘just as well’ with respect to all of the State’s constitutionally permissible districting criteria,” it wrote.
In other words, courts can only force red states to draw additional majority-minority districts if those districts will vote for Republican candidates. Since this will never happen in the South, where race and partisanship are intertwined, it ensures that red states’ efforts to gerrymander Republican candidates into easy wins will always trump Black voters’ ability to elect members of Congress who represent their interests.
In a final twist of the knife, the Court offers up a grotesque (and utterly predictable) perversion of the Purcell principle, the notion that courts shouldn’t tinker with voting laws and maps just before an election. It’s a given by now that this right-wing majority will always contort that idea in whatever way benefits Republicans. But it’s particularly galling to see it invoked in a case where the options are: a) conduct the already in-progress elections under the same map Alabama used in 2024 and prepared to use this cycle or, b) throw out primary votes from certain districts and task election administrators to reassign hundreds of thousands of voters (a process that usually takes at least four months) in days, if not hours.
Adding insult to injury, this Court had previously ruled that it was too close to Alabama’s elections to impose a new map (one that remedied the state’s discrimination) a whole three months before the primary.
“While federal courts should not impose changes close to an election, States are free to decide for themselves whether last-minute changes to an election are in their best interests,” the majority wrote.
Translation: Purcell counts except when Republican states don’t want it to.
In her dissent, Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, pointed out that the majority didn’t even bother to address one of the primary tenets of the district court’s ruling: that the Alabama map also violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The majority builds its argument almost entirely on Callais, which didn’t touch on unconstitutional racial gerrymanders at all.
“It is hard to see how the District Court’s finding of discriminatory intent under the Fourteenth Amendment could have departed from an opinion that purported to say nothing about how to find discriminatory intent under the Fourteenth Amendment,” Sotomayor quipped.
The order is so shoddy and blatantly inconsistent with the Court’s previous orders that it shows how far the Roberts Court has traveled beyond serious attempts to mask its partisan aims in legal reasoning. It’s a rubber stamp for red states seeking to entrench Republican power at the expense of their Black constituents. It’s an eager co-conspirator in the mission to roll back 60 years of bloodily secured civil rights.
The order, Sotomayor wrote, “debases the democratic process by upending Alabama’s entire election in the name of permitting Alabama to discriminate against Black Alabamians.”
Read the order here:
