Supreme Court’s Alabama Gambit Entrenches a Right to Racial Gerrymandering

The Roberts Court’s unsigned order in the Alabama redistricting dispute does more than greenlight one map; it codifies a doctrinal shift that converts the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition on racial discrimination into an affirmative license for partisan actors to diminish Black voting power. By rewarding Alabama’s defiance of a 2023 injunction the Court itself had once endorsed, the majority effectively nullifies the results-oriented test Congress embedded in Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. This move extends the logic first signaled in Louisiana v. Callais, where Justice Alito reframed race-conscious districting as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander even when the state’s own data showed Black voters were packed or cracked to preserve white majorities. The downstream effect reaches beyond congressional lines: state legislatures now possess a ready template for arguing that any Voting Rights Act remedy is itself discriminatory, a stance already surfacing in pending challenges to Georgia’s and Texas’s maps. Historical precedent reveals the pattern. After Shelby County v. Holder gutted preclearance in 2013, states immediately enacted strict voter-ID and purging regimes whose disparate impact on minority turnout was documented by the Brennan Center and the GAO. The current ruling accelerates that rollback by removing the last statutory backstop against intentional dilution. Civil-rights enforcement agencies will face steeper evidentiary burdens, while lower courts—already stocked with Trump appointees—will cite Alabama as authority to dismiss effect-based claims. The Court’s claim that it is merely enforcing “neutral” rules ignores the documented correlation between Republican control and maps that systematically underweight Black populations in the South, a correlation traced in the Princeton Gerrymandering Project’s 2024 report. What the Atlantic piece understates is the speed with which this precedent will migrate from redistricting to other domains of election administration, including at-large municipal systems and felon-disenfranchisement statutes.