Alabama's legislature is moving toward a new congressional map this week, NPR Politics reports, after the Supreme Court ruled its previous lines violated the Voting Rights Act.
Democratic lawmakers argued during debate that the proposed new maps still dilute Black voting power — suggesting the state is finding another route to the same destination the Court already blocked.
This is not a new maneuver. The question is whether the Court will finally insist on what it already said it meant.
The last time Alabama was forced by federal authority to redraw its political geography, it took years of litigation, federal oversight, and eventually the Shelby County v. Holder decision in 2013 — which gutted the preclearance requirement that had made such oversight possible — before the state’s legislature felt free to act without prior federal approval.
Allen v. Milligan, decided by the Supreme Court in 2023, was supposed to close that circle. The Court held, 5-4, that Alabama’s 2021 congressional map likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by packing Black voters into a single district and diluting their influence everywhere else. The state was ordered to draw a second majority-Black district, or something close to it.
Alabama’s legislature responded by drawing a map that the three-judge federal panel supervising the case found still did not comply. A remedial map was eventually imposed. Now, per NPR’s reporting, the legislature is back at the table, with Democratic members arguing the maps under consideration still dilute Black voting power.
The post-Reconstruction playbook — formal legal compliance paired with practical nullification — is among the most durable in American political history. After the 15th Amendment, states used literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and white primaries. After the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they turned to gerrymandering. The specific instrument changes; the intent, as courts have repeatedly found, does not.
What makes the current moment structurally significant is that it tests whether Milligan has teeth. The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority surprised many observers by upholding Section 2 in that case. But a ruling is only as durable as its enforcement. If Alabama can absorb multiple rounds of litigation, delay implementation through successive map proposals, and emerge with lines that functionally reproduce the original violation, then the ruling’s practical meaning collapses — regardless of what it says on paper.
That outcome would follow a pattern constitutional historians recognize: a formal legal victory for civil rights that is eroded, slowly, through procedural attrition.
The three-judge panel that has supervised this litigation retains jurisdiction. Whether it accepts or rejects whatever the Alabama legislature produces this week is the next material fact. Democratic legislators’ objections, as reported, at minimum establish a record for further challenge.
It is worth noting that the symmetric-criticism principle applies here: legislative majorities of both parties have used redistricting to entrench their own power, and the manipulation of district lines is a bipartisan vice at the national level. But the specific claim before the court in Alabama is a Voting Rights Act violation — a finding already made by the Supreme Court — not a generic partisan gerrymander. The legal standard is different, and the history behind it is different.
The 2026 election cycle is live. Every week of litigation is a week closer to November, and delay itself is a strategy with a successful track record in Southern redistricting disputes going back generations.
The Court said what the law requires. Alabama is testing whether saying it was enough.