The U.S. Supreme Court has once again rejected a bid by lower courts to block the Yellowhammer State from redrawing congressional district maps in accordance with a recent ruling from the high court. A three-judge federal panel last month barred Alabama from using congressional district maps drawn in 2023, largely ignoring a Supreme Court ruling and a subsequent SCOTUS order to argue that the maps are racially discriminatory. On Tuesday, the justices intervened in the case for the third time and struck down the lower court’s order, allowing Alabama to proceed with its 2023 maps, which are expected to benefit the GOP.

In its ruling Tuesday, the Supreme Court stipulated that the lower court’s order violates the Supreme Court’s holding in Louisiana v. Callais, gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and largely eliminating the practice of race-based redistricting. “Callais updated these standards,” the court’s majority wrote, noting that states are permitted to adjust congressional district lines to achieve political goals, even if it means breaking up districts composed of a majority of ethnic minority voters. “Those legitimate districting objectives, we held, include ‘the State’s specified political goals’ and ‘any other goal not prohibited by the Constitution.’ A plaintiff also ‘cannot use race as a districting criterion’ in preparing the alternative map,” the high court clarified. “These updates, we held, were necessary to avoid requiring congressional maps under [Section] 2 that would be unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.”

The Supreme Court asserted that the lower court’s “analysis departed from Callais. 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.” (Emphasis original.) The lower court, however, had simply claimed that Alabama’s proposed maps intentionally discriminated on the basis of race and that the state would therefore have to continue using a set of maps that gave Democrats at least one more seat in the U.S. House of Representatives than state officials determined was fair. “The District Court also failed to follow our instruction in Callais that the mere fact that voters of different races vote for different parties is not relevant to proving racially polarized voting patterns,” the Supreme Court continued.

The lower court also likely overstepped its bounds by interfering in the state’s ongoing political elections. “We have repeatedly cautioned that lower federal courts should not ‘alter the election rules on the eve of an election,’” the Supreme Court warned. “Here, the District Court interposed itself into Alabama’s ongoing efforts to conduct its imminent 2026 congressional elections under maps that its elected representatives selected. Its view that conducting the elections under court-imposed maps would be more convenient for the State was not a valid justification for that intervention.”

Under the maps ordered by the lower court, Democrats hold two of Alabama’s seven congressional districts. The maps that the Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed to go into effect are expected to flip at least one of those districts into Republican hands, bolstering the GOP’s narrow House majority.

Democrat-appointed Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the court’s majority, as they have in other VRA-related rulings. “Before the Court are two paths. Down one lies an orderly election, held under a tried-and-tested congressional map that protects Black Alabamians’ right to vote and with which all voters, elections officials, and candidates alike are familiar,” Sotomayor wrote in her 17-page dissent. (The majority’s ruling took up four pages.) “Down the other lies a chaotic election, held under a never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians, that Alabama adopted in unashamed defiance of a prior court order directly affirmed by this Court, and that will require officials to change the voter registrations of hundreds of thousands of voters in just days at best,” she continued. “The majority chooses the second path and disregards both democratic values and the rule of law.”

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall (R) hailed the majority’s decision as “a major victory for Alabama and for the principle of self-governance.” In a press release, he stated, “The Supreme Court rightly recognized that its recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais fundamentally changes the legal landscape. The district court’s brazen refusal to apply that controlling precedent left the Court with no choice but to intervene and put a stop to the district court’s attempts to override the will of the people.”

Marshall continued, “For too long, Alabama has been denied the full measure of its sovereignty by judges who insist on treating our state as though it never moved beyond the 1960s. No more. We have the same right as any other state to draw our own congressional maps according to our own legitimate districting objectives, without being held to a different and more burdensome standard by federal courts.” He affirmed that Alabama “will not allow unelected judges to repeatedly redraw our State’s electoral maps in defiance of the Supreme Court’s own standards. We look forward to full vindication on appeal and will continue to defend Alabama’s right to conduct its own elections.”

In a separate statement, Marshall slammed opponents of the 2023 maps as openly partisan. “We’ve had a three-judge panel order Alabama to create what they’ve described as a ‘minority opportunity district,’” he said. “I call that a Democratic district.”