Alabama Redistricting Battle Is Back at SCOTUS, With a Lay-Up From the DOJ's Civil Rights Division

https://redstate.com/jenniferoo/2026/05/27/alabama-redistricting-battle-m
oves-back-to-scotus-n2202771 

As RedState reported, in 2023, a district court three-judge panel
blocked the use of 2023 maps drawn by the Alabama legislature and forced
them to draw a second majority-minority district. After the Supreme
Court of the United States' decision in Louisiana v. Callais, Alabama
petitioned for redress of this ruling, and SCOTUS vacated the district
court decision in early May, sending it back to the district court to
review the case. 

On Tuesday, this same three-judge panel once again blocked the use of
2023 maps on the same basis: that the maps are deliberately
discriminatory and violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The
district court panel claims they are striving to prevent confusion among
the voters. However, their refusal to apply the latest SCOTUS ruling to
determine this case has bred more confusion than maps that change two
districts. 

As projected, on Wednesday, Alabama attorney general Steve Marshall
filed an application for an emergency stay with SCOTUS, which would
allow the state to still use the 2023 maps. 

Alabama's Solicitor General A. Barrett Bowdre presented the brief: 

In its filing on Wednesday, Alabama urged the court to freeze the lower
court’s ruling and allow it to use the 2023 map in the upcoming
elections. That map, Bowdre wrote, “addressed this Court’s concerns
about the State’s prioritization of core retention” – the principle of
trying to have districts resemble their earlier iterations as closely as
possible – “at the cost of splitting the Black Belt region,” an area in
central Alabama originally named for its rich, dark soil but now named
for its large Black population, the descendants of formerly enslaved
people. The 2023 map, Bowdre said, divided the Black Belt “as little as
possible, while also keeping together the Gulf Coast as the State had
done for 50 years.” 

As stated in Alabama Map Fight Erupts Again As Federal Panel Defies
SCOTUS Momentum, the district court's interpretation comes off as utter
nonsense. Either maps are being drawn without racial specifications, or
they are not. 

“Callais,” Bowdre continued, “vindicates Alabama’s position on the
lawfulness of the 2023 Plan, yet the district court decided in one week
that Callais changed nothing.” The district court, Bowdre stressed, did
not require the challengers to offer alternative maps that would achieve
Alabama’s goals while still maintaining two majority-Black districts, as
the Supreme Court suggested it should have, and “[i]t did not matter to
the district court that drawing an additional race-based district came
at the cost of sacrificing communities of interest and pairing
incumbents.” 

“Worse,” Bowdre concluded, the district court’s conclusion that the
state intentionally violated the Constitution rests on the idea “that
Alabama intentionally discriminated by refusing to intentionally
discriminate.” 

Shorter, Bowdre is begging the court to make it make sense.

As stated before, this makes little sense except as a tactic to prevent
the August 11 special election from moving forward. The work of
reassigning voters to new districts was scheduled to begin on Wednesday,
May 27. Last Friday, Alabama Director of Elections Jeff Elrod testified
to the panel that the window for voter rolls to be unlocked would be
between Wednesday, May 27, and Tuesday, June 2. This is an exceptionally
tight window in which to work; thus, the state's request for an
administrative stay. 

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has purview over this
Northern Alabama district court, so the petition for a stay ended up on
his docket. 

On Wednesday afternoon, Justice Thomas issued his response but declined
to immediately restore the use of the 2023 maps. Thomas did order the
plaintiffs in this action to respond to Alabama's request by Monday,
June 1, at 4:00 p.m. 

What may weigh in Alabama's favor is the amicus brief filed by the Civil
Rights Division of the Department of Justice. In it, Assistant Attorney
General Harmeet Dhillon and Solicitor General John Sauer argue that the
district court is not assessing the case with the newly established
precedent of Callais in the forefront. 


On remand, however, the district court promptly reinstated its
pre-Callais injunction largely based on its pre-Callais reasoning. The
court held that Alabama had engaged in intentional discrimination by
declining to draw a second black opportunity district that the court had
earlier suggested was a required remedy for a Section 2 violation. And
the court again held that Alabama had violated Section 2. Those holdings
were wrong even before Callais and are indefensible after it. 

With respect to intentional discrimination, the district court paid only
lip service to its obligations to “disentangle race and politics” and to
begin “with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith.”
Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, 602 U.S. 1, 6
(2024). The court disregarded Alabama’s indisputably partisan aims when
the 2026 legislature chose to use the 2023 map for the upcoming midterms
and when the 2023 legislature pursued incumbency protection. 

Essentially, Dhillon and Sauer surmised the three-judge panel disparaged
Alabama's good faith intent, twisting it into an effort to be
intentionally racist. 

The district court instead concluded that Alabama must have intended to
discriminate because it declined to draw a second black opportunity
district that the district court had signaled Section 2 required. But a
State’s insistence on pursuing its partisan goals in the face of an
earlier Section 2 holding does not somehow make those partisan goals
racially discriminatory. The district court’s contrary holding flouts a
central lesson of Callais: that the pre-Callais Section 2 standard
improperly condemned the refusal to create additional majority-minority
districts in situations that did not even support “a strong inference”
of intentional discrimination. 146 S.Ct. at 1157; see id. at 1157-1161.
In any event, Alabama sought in good faith to correct the disparate
treatment of two communities of interest—the Gulf Coast and the Black
Belt—that was the premise of this Court’s pre-Callais holding in Allen
v.Milligan, 599 U.S. 1 (2023), that an earlier map violated Section 2.
That legitimate effort to comply with this Court’s decision cannot be
reasonably construed as racial discrimination, particularly in light of
the presumption of good faith. 

The district court’s decision to reinstate its Section 2 holding despite
Callais was tainted by the same errors. 

The court again failed to disentangle race and politics, ignored
Alabama’s partisan goals, and deemed illegitimate the State’s effort to
preserve the Gulf Coast community. The court also failed to hold
respondents to their burden to control for party affiliation in
analyzing racial voting patterns, relying on a smattering of largely
irrelevant pre-Callais findings. And the court used its flawed
intentional-discrimination analysis to conclude that the totality of
circumstances demonstrated likely intentional discrimination in
violation of Section 2. 

For all intents and purposes, the district court panel is ordering
Alabama to violate the Constitution. 

Thus, as in Callais, the court ordered a racial gerrymander, mandating a
minority-opportunity district that the State never would have created
based on its race-neutral districting principles and political goals.
See 146 S. Ct. at 1161-1162; see also Malliotakis v.Williams, 146 S. Ct.
809, 810 (2026) (Alito, J., concurring in the grant of stay) 

Dhillon and Sauer further argued that the district court was acting in
bad faith to disrupt an already established election. The district court
did not stay in its lane in its attempt to dictate what would or would
not be a burden to voters. 

Worse still, the district court issued its injunction deep into the
election calendar—less than three months before the primary and after
the candidate-qualifying window had closed. The court excused that clear
violation of Purcell v. Gonzalez, 549 U.S. 1 (2006) (per curiam), on the
theory that Alabama had created the timing problem by deciding to use
the 2023 map only after Callais, even though the State acted as soon as
it could once this Court vacated the prior injunction in light of
Callais. But state legislatures are democratically elected bodies that
are competent to make the policy judgments inherent in late election
changes and are accountable to the voters for any ill effects. Federal
district courts do not have the same license to interfere with election
rules at the eleventh hour, particularly on such dubious merits
theories. 

Pretty brutal. We will see what counterargument the plaintiffs in this
case choose to submit and what SCOTUS will decide to hopefully put this
to bed once and for all.  


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