A federal district court struck down the state’s new congressional map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
Demonstrators hold signs in support of Black voting rights outside the Supreme Court on October 15, 2025.
(Celal Gunes / Anadolu via Getty Images)
The US District Court in Alabama has decided not to let the state go quietly back to the Jim Crow era as the Supreme Court would like. In a ruling issued on Tuesday, a three-judge panel, which included two judges appointed by Donald Trump, rejected Alabama’s latest attempt to gerrymander away the political power of Black people.
Alabama has already indicated that it will file an emergency appeal. I’m forced to assume that this appeal will be granted and the white-wing Supreme Court will overrule the lower court. But the decision is still a striking and emphatic rejection of the racism Republicans wish to reinject into American elections.
The case is just the latest in the long-running saga of Allen v. Milligan. After the 2020 Census, Alabama redrew its congressional map in such a way that only one of its seven districts was majority-minority. The map purposely diluted the voting power of Black people in Alabama, especially those living in the so-called “Black Belt,” which cuts laterally across the state.
This map was challenged by voting-rights activists who asked the state to draw a second majority-minority district. Alabama is 26 percent Black and 6 percent Latino, so having two of seven districts be majority-minority makes mathematical sense. The voting-rights activists won in district court but, in February 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that it was too close to the November 2022 midterms to force Alabama to redraw its maps. The 2022 election went ahead with only one majority-minority district.
In 2023, the Supreme Court once again took up the case—this time to rule on its merits, not just timing—and ruled that Alabama’s maps were racist and therefore unconstitutional. The Alabama legislature then put forth another map, which the district court calls the 2023 Plan, which was essentially the same as the 2021 map the Supreme Court had just rejected. The district court rejected this 2023 Plan as well, and ordered a special master to draw a new map. That new map had two majority-minority districts that kept Black communities intact across the state.
The district court calls this map the “special master map.” The 2024 elections took place under this map, and the 2026 midterm elections were set to take place under the same map. But at the end of April, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais. This case effectively killed the 1965 Voting Rights Act and allowed the states to resurrect Jim Crow types of voter suppression, including gerrymandering away Black voting power.
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Whites in Alabama immediately sprung into action. The state interpreted Callais as overruling Allen v. Milligan, and attempted to reinstate its planned 2023 map.
That map is what the three-judge district court panel rejected, for essentially the third time, on Tuesday. The court found that, even after Callais, the remaining shard of the Voting Rights Act still prohibits maps that are intentionally racist, and Alabama legislature’s map intentionally seeks to take voting power away from Black people. This is a finding that the Supreme Court itself made back when Milligan was decided, and the district court saw nothing in the record to suggest a different conclusion. Instead, the district court ordered Alabama to continue using the special master map, which has two majority-minority districts, for the upcoming elections.
Part of what’s happening here is that white Republicans in Alabama are being shiftless and lazy. Their map has been ruled intentionally racist by multiple courts on multiple occasions. Trying to ram through this particular map is the worst possible version of trying to make fetch happen. Could Alabama draw a map with only one Black district in a way that courts approve? Probably! Again, there are two Trump judges on this very district court panel, and it’s not exactly difficult to get Trump judges to give the go-ahead to racism. But trying again and again to get the courts to affirm an old map that has already been ruled unconstitutional borders on insanity.
Then again, while Alabama doesn’t have a good legal argument for using its old, unconstitutional map, it does have something arguably more important: a Supreme Court that might be so desperate to crush Black voting rights that legal arguments don’t matter.
To understand how the court could maneuver this, it helps to know about a legal doctrine invented by the court to help it generate the outcomes it wants: the Purcell Principle. At its most basic, this doctrine states that changes to election rules (like, for instance, which districts exist) cannot be made “too close” to an upcoming election. How close is too close? Only the Supreme Court knows. In 2022, the Supreme Court used this principle to uphold the racist map Alabama now wants to use, and the court could well do it again.
Whether it does will depend on which map the Supreme Court decides to use as the “current” map—and, therefore, which party it believes is trying to change the rules. The district court argued in its ruling that the special master map is the legitimate one because the election was set to be held under it until several weeks ago; under this logic, Alabama is trying to change the rules. Alabama, however, is likely to argue in its appeal to the Supreme Court that the planned map, the one that wasn’t set to be used in this election, is the current one because the legislature voted after the Callais decision to try it again. Who will be right? Well, obviously the district court is correct. We know this because candidates are literally already involved in primary contests based on the special master map. We are well past the time when the state should be able to change the boundaries of its districts.
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But the Supreme Court is apparently happy to ignore its Purcell Principle whenever there is an opportunity to take away voting power from Black people. Just a few weeks ago, it literally rejected the traditional 32-day waiting period that should have followed the Callais decision just so that states could take away Black power expeditiously—which a bunch of states promptly did. Louisiana straight up called off the primaries so that it could erase Black districts before the midterm elections. Tennessee split the city of Memphis so that it could take away the state’s lone Black district.
I expect the Supreme Court to continue its racist streak when it weighs in on this case. I expect it will stay the lower court’s ruling, citing Purcell, and allow Alabama to conduct the 2026 midterms with its racist map. Perhaps, in 2027, the Supreme Court will reject the map again and force Alabama to do the apparently backbreaking work of drawing a new racist map. But as the operating goal of the current Supreme Court appears to be helping Republicans hang on to the House in 2026, it will likely rule for Alabama in the short term.
The only hope here is that Chief Justice John Roberts and either alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh or Amy Coney Barrett are offended by Alabama’s sheer laziness. They already rejected Alabama’s legislature’s map as intentionally racist. To allow it now, they would have to essentially admit they were wrong. And such an admission would encourage states to ignore future Supreme Court rulings on the theory that adverse rulings are just temporary setbacks.
The district court put that issue front and center in its ruling. The panel wrote:
Alabama cannot use Callais to legitimize its pre-Callais decision to double down on the discriminatory vote dilution that we and the Supreme Court found.… If such retroactive validation strategies were available, States would be encouraged to govern themselves according to what they think federal law ought to be, not what it is.
We know Roberts hates Black voting rights. But we also know he loves power. Is he willing to sacrifice the latter to accomplish the former? I guess we’ll find out soon.
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