Alabama state officials have asked the Supreme Court to permit them to abandon their court-ordered congressional district map, arguing that the Court's own recent ruling limiting the Voting Rights Act gives them grounds to do so, per NYT Politics.
This pattern is older than the VRA itself. Since Reconstruction, Alabama has returned to federal courts after every major voting-rights defeat not to comply but to relitigate — seeking the narrowest possible reading of each ruling until compliance became optional. The 1965 Act was Congress's answer to exactly that cycle. What Alabama is now arguing, in effect, is that the Court has handed it a key to that door.
The historical stakes: if the Court accepts Alabama's reasoning, the VRA's Section 2 — already narrowed in Brnovich v. DNC (2021) — loses much of its remaining remedial force. The question is no longer whether Alabama will draw a fair map. It is whether any federal authority remains to compel one.