Supreme Court allows Alabama to use congressional map that dilutes Black vote

The Supreme Court on Tuesday night said it would allow the state of Alabama to use a new map for congressional districts that a lower federal court had ruled was discriminatory to Black voters.

The 6-3 ruling by the Supreme Court, which will eliminate one of the two majority Black districts in Alabama, is expected to result in Republicans gaining one seat from the state in the House of Representatives in November’s midterm elections.

The ruling by the Supreme Court’s six-member conservative majority was unsigned. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent to the decision, in which she was joined by her fellow liberal justices, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Republicans hold a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives. Since last year that have forced redistricting in a number of states in an effort to retain that majority in the upcoming elections, which in turn led to identical efforts by Democrats in other states.

Tuesday’s decision by the Supreme Court overturns a ruling issued May 26 by a panel of three judges in U.S. District Court in Birmingham, Ala., which found that the state’s map proposed in 2023 “intentionally discriminated based on race.”

That panel had been compelled to revisit a prior decision barring the map from being used in state elections in light of a recent Supreme Court ruling in the case known as Louisiana v. Callais.

The Supreme Court in that case found that Louisiana’s drawing of its own congressional maps was a racial gerrymander.

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