Alabama filed a pair of emergency petitions to the Supreme Court on Wednesday, urging it to lift a lower court’s block of a new congressional map that could help the GOP flip a Democratic seat in the 2026 elections.Earlier this month, the Supreme Court tossed a three-judge panel’s previous finding that the map was the result of an unlawful racial gerrymander, asking the panel to reconsider the case in light of the justices’ ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which significantly raised the legal bar for proving claims of intentional racial discrimination when drawing congressional maps. The three-judge panel came to the same conclusion as it did in its previous ruling on Tuesday, and Alabama Solicitor General A. Barrett Bowdre argued to the Supreme Court in his emergency petition that the renewed ruling defies, rather than follows, the Supreme Court’s Callais ruling.“Among other faults, the district court’s injunction halts ongoing election preparations for reasons that defy Louisiana v. Callais,” the pair of emergency petitions reads.
Alabama argued in its petition that the state followed the standard set out in Callais, while promoting its goals of protecting incumbents, among other race-neutral objectives, when drawing the map but that the lower court still insisted that officials needed to create two black-majority districts despite the high court’s recent ruling on race-based redistricting.
