The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday vacated a lower-court order that had blocked Alabama from using a Republican-drawn congressional map for this year's midterm elections, opening the door for the state to eliminate one of its two majority-Black districts and giving the GOP another likely House seat in a slim chamber.

The unsigned, one-paragraph order in a 6-3 vote sent the dispute back to the three-judge district court panel that struck the map down, instructing it to reconsider the case in light of the Court's April 29 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which sharply narrowed the reach of Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Court offered no further explanation. All three liberal justices dissented.

For Alabama, where Black residents make up more than a quarter of the population, the immediate practical effect is that the 2023 map drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature — which contains only one majority-Black district out of seven — is no longer enjoined. The map currently in effect, drawn by a court-appointed special master after years of litigation, contains two majority-Black districts. Both are held by Black Democrats.

The order and the dissent

The Court's majority did not write an opinion. The order said only that the lower court's injunction was vacated and the case remanded "for further consideration in light of Callais."

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented in a four-page opinion. Her central argument was that the district court had not relied solely on the Voting Rights Act in striking down the 2023 map. It had also concluded, after a trial, that the map was the product of intentional racial discrimination in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause — a finding she said was "independent of, and unaffected by, any of the legal issues discussed in Callais."

"The Court today unceremoniously discards the District Court's meticulously documented and supported discriminatory-intent finding and careful remedial order without any sound basis for doing so and without regard for the confusion that will surely ensue," Sotomayor wrote. "The record showed that Alabama made an intentional choice to perpetuate and entrench, rather than remedy and uproot, the racial discrimination that the District Court had previously found and that this Court had affirmed."

She also flagged the timing. Alabama's congressional primary is scheduled for May 19, just one week away, and early voting is already underway. "Vacatur is thus inappropriate and will cause only confusion as Alabamians begin to vote in the elections scheduled for next week," she wrote, adding that vacating a lower-court order "is an equitable remedy, and the Court should not lightly wield it to unleash chaos and to confuse voters."

The dissent noted the district court remains free, on remand, to determine whether Callais affects its Fourteenth Amendment analysis or leaves it intact.

How the case got here

The litigation traces back to the map Alabama enacted after the 2020 census. That map contained one majority-Black district out of seven. A group of Black voters and civil rights organizations sued, arguing it diluted minority voting strength in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The district court agreed and blocked the map. The Supreme Court upheld that ruling in Allen v. Milligan in June 2023 — a decision authored by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the three liberals.

The Legislature then drew a new map in 2023 that still contained only one majority-Black district. The same three-judge panel rejected it that September, the Supreme Court declined to intervene, and a court-appointed special master drew the current two-district map. Under that map, Democrat Shomari Figures was elected in 2024, giving Alabama two Black members of Congress for the first time in the state's history.

In 2025, after a full trial, the panel issued an additional ruling: the 2023 map, the judges wrote, was "an intentional effort to dilute Black Alabamians' voting strength and evade the unambiguous requirements of court orders standing in the way." That intentional-discrimination finding, grounded in the Fourteenth Amendment, was what Sotomayor pointed to in dissent.

Alabama's appeal of that 2025 ruling was held at the Supreme Court pending Callais. When the Court issued that decision on April 29 — invalidating Louisiana's second majority-Black district as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander — Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall filed emergency motions asking the justices to vacate the Alabama injunction immediately. Monday's order grants that request.

Politics, the primary, and the next round of voting

The political stakes are immediate. The district most likely to flip is Alabama's 2nd Congressional District, currently held by Figures. The seat stretches from Mobile across the Black Belt and was the product of the court-imposed remedy. If the 2023 map is restored, the configuration of that district disappears, and the seat is widely expected to flip Republican.

Anticipating Monday's order, the Alabama Legislature passed and Gov. Kay Ivey signed legislation last week allowing the state to void results in primary contests held in districts affected by a map change. Under that statute, results in the four affected districts on May 19 will be set aside, and the governor will set new primary dates once the map question is fully resolved. Primary results in districts not affected by any redraw will stand.

Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen said the May 19 primary will proceed as scheduled, with his office in coordination with the governor's office "as this situation continues developing."

Marshall framed the ruling as a victory of state authority over judicial intervention. "Today, the Supreme Court vindicated the state's long-held position. Now, the power to draw Alabama's maps goes back to the people's elected representatives. That's our Legislature," he said in a video statement, adding that his goal was "to put the legislature in the best possible legal position to draw a congressional map that favors Republicans seven-to-zero." He closed with: "Stay tuned." Republican House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter called the decision "a massive victory not just for Alabama, but for conservatives across the country."

Civil rights groups condemned the order. NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement, "We are witnessing a return to Jim Crow. And anybody who is alarmed by these developments — as everybody should be — better be making a plan to vote in November to put an end to this madness while we still can." Deuel Ross, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney who argued the case, said his team "will consider all of our options to fight to protect the rights of these voters and keep the court ordered map in place." Figures called the decision "incredibly unfortunate" and said it "sets the stage for Alabama to go back to the 1950s and '60s in terms of Black political representation in the state."

Shalela Dowdy, one of the plaintiffs in the underlying case, said the state would not stop here. "For me, I feel like this is a step backwards towards the Jim Crow era for congressional representation. The state is not going to stop here."

The wider redistricting fight

The Alabama order is the latest move in a mid-decade redistricting battle that has accelerated sharply since Callais. Texas was the first state to redraw, at President Donald Trump's urging last year. Missouri, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee have followed on the Republican side. Republicans believe the combined effect could net them up to 14 additional U.S. House seats this November. California and Utah are the principal Democratic counterparts; the party estimates a combined gain of up to six.

The Democratic side took a significant hit on May 8, when the Virginia Supreme Court struck down a Democratic-drawn map approved by voters in an April referendum, a ruling that would have given the party as many as four additional seats. Virginia Democrats filed an emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday seeking to restore that map; the justices have not yet acted on it.

Louisiana is moving to redraw under Callais. South Carolina is weighing a redraw. Tennessee Republicans last week passed a new map that eliminates a Memphis-anchored seat held by Democrat Steve Cohen. The NAACP has filed an emergency petition to block it.

The combined effect is that the makeup of the U.S. House — currently held by Republicans on a narrow margin — could be reshaped in significant measure by litigation and legislation that did not exist six months ago. The remand in Alabama now puts the three-judge panel back at the center of one of the most consequential of those fights, with the question whether the Fourteenth Amendment finding can independently sustain the prior injunction unresolved. Voting in Alabama begins next week regardless.