Alabama Republicans are taking their congressional redistricting fight back to the Supreme Court after a federal court blocked the state’s GOP-backed map. The federal court ruled this week that Republicans intentionally discriminated against Black voters despite the Supreme Court’s recent decision weakening the Voting Rights Act. On Wednesday, Alabama officials filed an emergency appeal asking the nation’s highest court to allow the state to use a Republican-favored congressional map for the 2026 elections. Control for the U.S. House could come down to just a handful of seats. So, Alabama being able to shift even one seat to Republicans is a big deal. The filing came just one day after a three-judge federal panel ruled Alabama could not move forward with the map and instead must continue using a court-ordered district configuration that helped Democrats gain an additional congressional seat.
The latest legal battle has quickly become one of the biggest tests yet of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which significantly narrowed the use of race in congressional redistricting and triggered a wave of Republican-led map redraws across the South. Alabama Republicans argue the Supreme Court’s ruling vindicates their position and clears the way for the state to abandon a map containing two majority-Black districts. But the lower federal court said the issue in Alabama goes beyond the Voting Rights Act alone. In Tuesday’s ruling, the panel concluded the Alabama map still reflected unconstitutional racial discrimination.
