A federal three-judge panel blocked Alabama’s proposed congressional map on Tuesday, ruling that the GOP-drawn plan was “tainted by intentional race-based discrimination” and ordering the state to keep using a court-imposed map with two majority-Black districts ahead of the 2026 midterms.
The decision hands Alabama Republicans a setback in their effort to reclaim a congressional seat now held by Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures. But it may be a temporary one. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall immediately vowed to take the case to the Supreme Court, and he did not sound like a man bracing for defeat.
The ruling sits at the intersection of two competing legal currents: a recent Supreme Court decision curbing the use of race in drawing electoral districts, and lower-court precedent that found Alabama’s 2023 map was drawn with discriminatory intent. How the high court resolves that tension could reshape redistricting fights across the South for a generation.
The three-judge panel’s language left little room for ambiguity. Fox News reported that the court declared it could not require Alabama voters “to cast their votes in the 2026 elections under a districting plan tainted by intentional race-based discrimination.” The panel added:
“We again cannot understand the 2023 Plan as anything other than intentionally discriminatory.”
Under the blocked map, Republicans stood to gain one seat by eliminating a Black-majority district in southeastern Alabama. That district is currently held by Figures, who won it in 2024 under a court-ordered map that created two majority-Black congressional districts in the state.
The panel issued a preliminary injunction requiring Alabama to continue using those court-ordered districts. Newsmax reported that Black voters’ lawyers had argued the new map was intentionally discriminatory, pointing to a 2023 finding by the same panel as evidence.
Gov. Kay Ivey had already scheduled House primaries for August 11 under the contested map. That timeline is now in limbo.
The political reactions split along predictable lines, but the tone from each side revealed something about where this fight is headed.
Marshall, the state’s attorney general, projected certainty that the Supreme Court would reverse the panel. His statement read less like a concession and more like a preview of his appellate brief:
“Know this: In my mind, it is not a matter of whether we win this case, only when.”
That confidence is not unfounded. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling curbing race-based district drawing gave Republican-led states a new legal framework to challenge maps that sort voters primarily by race. Alabama Republicans moved to implement their 2023 map on the strength of that ruling after a court earlier in May allowed the state to proceed while sending the case back to U.S. District Court in Birmingham for reconsideration.
The panel’s Tuesday decision reversed that posture, reimposing the old map and blocking the new one before it could take effect for the midterms.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, meanwhile, used the moment to frame the fight as a battle against presidential overreach. In a statement Tuesday, Jeffries said:
“The Supreme Court must now do the right thing, if the state of Alabama seeks judicial sanction to violate the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. The American people must be permitted to decide who gets to represent them in Congress, not Donald Trump.”
Jeffries’s invocation of the president was not accidental. President Trump has urged GOP-led states in the South to aggressively redraw their congressional maps to benefit Republicans. Democrats want to make him the face of every redistricting dispute, regardless of whether the maps in question are lawful.
Alabama is not the only state where Republicans are pressing redistricting advantages. AP News reported on the federal court’s decision as part of a wider pattern of legal challenges to new congressional maps across the South. Tennessee, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana have all seen similar efforts.
In Tennessee, Republicans earlier in May drew Rep. Steve Cohen out of his Memphis-anchored district, where Black voters had constituted a majority. That move, like Alabama’s, aimed to convert a Democratic-held seat into a competitive or Republican-leaning one. Tennessee lawmakers approved a new congressional map designed to eliminate the state’s last Democratic seat, a move that drew its own legal scrutiny.
The legal and political dynamics are not one-sided. Courts have also intervened against Democratic redistricting overreach. The Virginia Supreme Court struck down a Democrat-backed redistricting map that would have given the party a lopsided 10, 1 congressional edge, a reminder that judicial oversight cuts both ways.
And when the Supreme Court has weighed in directly, it has not always sided with lower courts. The high court reversed a lower court and upheld a Texas congressional redistricting map in a case that reinforced states’ authority to draw their own lines within constitutional limits.
Rep. Figures, whose seat is the one at stake, struck a cautious tone in his public response. He praised the panel’s ruling but made clear he expects a Supreme Court appeal:
“I am pleased with the Court’s decision, but this case is still not over. Although we expected the Court to reach this decision given the overwhelming evidence, we fully expect the State to immediately appeal the decision to the Supreme Court. This is a significant step in the right direction, but there is still a long way to go before this fight is settled.”
That last line is the most honest assessment any participant in this case has offered. The panel’s ruling is a preliminary injunction, not a final judgment. It preserves the status quo while the legal challenge proceeds, but it does not end the dispute.
The New York Post noted that the court described the GOP-drawn map as “tainted,” language that signals the panel views the evidence of discriminatory intent as strong. Whether the Supreme Court agrees, or whether it applies its own recent precedent to reach a different conclusion, is the question that will determine whether Alabama’s congressional map changes before November.
For Republicans, the math is straightforward. Alabama’s current court-ordered map gives Democrats a structural advantage in two of the state’s seven congressional districts. The blocked map would have reduced that to one, netting the GOP a seat in a chamber where margins are razor-thin.
For Democrats, the case is about more than one seat. It is about whether the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on race and redistricting will be read broadly enough to let Republican legislatures redraw maps that were previously struck down. If Alabama wins at the Supreme Court, similar efforts in other Southern states gain legal cover.
The Democrats’ costly redistricting gamble in Virginia showed what happens when one party overplays its hand in court. Alabama’s case will test whether Republicans have calibrated their own legal strategy more carefully, or whether the lower courts will continue to hold the line.
Marshall’s appeal to the Supreme Court will likely move fast, given the August 11 primary date and the November midterms looming beyond it. The justices will have to decide whether a map drawn by elected state legislators or a map imposed by federal judges governs Alabama’s 2026 elections.
That is a question the Supreme Court has shown increasing willingness to answer, and not always in the direction lower courts prefer.
When unelected judges decide which maps voters get to use, the people drawing the short straw are always the voters themselves.
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