The Supreme Court just cleared Alabama to erase a majority-Black congressional district. The Voting Rights Act was supposed to prevent exactly this.
A Supreme Court majority sided with Alabama, allowing the state to advance a new congressional map that would eliminate its one majority-Black district. This comes after the Court's own 2023 ruling in Allen v. Milligan found Alabama's previous map likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — and ordered a remedial district drawn.
This sequence has a name: massive resistance by procedural delay. After Brown v. Board (1954), Southern states didn't refuse integration openly — they litigated, redistricted, and reorganized until federal mandates bled out. Alabama's playbook here follows the same grammar: comply just enough to survive the next ruling, then redraw. Congress closed this loop once before, in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, by requiring preclearance for exactly this kind of maneuver. The Supreme Court gutted preclearance in Shelby County v. Holder (2013). Alabama has been running the same play ever since.
If this map stands, Alabama — a state where roughly 27 percent of residents are Black — will likely send an all-white congressional delegation. Beyond Alabama, it signals to other states that the post-Milligan moment of VRA enforcement was temporary. The practical enforcement mechanism of Section 2 becomes: sue, win, watch the state redraw, sue again, run out the clock.
Watch whether the lower courts accept Alabama's new map as genuine compliance or flag it as a dodge. That ruling will determine whether Section 2 litigation still has teeth — or whether 'comply' now means 'stall until the next election cycle is over.'
Article I
American politics through the lens of the Constitution and the long memory.
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