By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON, May 27 (Reuters) – Alabama officials asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday to let the state use a pro-Republican congressional map erasing one of its two districts where Black voters comprise a majority or near-majority, as President Donald Trump’s party fights to keep control of Congress in November’s midterm elections.
The request followed a lower court’s decision on Tuesday to block the latest effort by state officials to put in place a redrawn map that aims to flip a U.S. House of Representatives district currently held by a Black Democratic congressman to the Republicans.
Black voters typically support Democratic candidates. Republicans are defending narrow majorities in the House and Senate in the midterms.
Alabama Republicans asked the Supreme Court to lift the judicial block put in place on Tuesday by a federal three-judge panel that found the Republican-backed map likely discriminated against Black voters and could not be used for the 2026 elections.
The Alabama Republicans argued in their filing to the justices that voters would face “irreparable harm” if the state is required to use a map approved by the lower court instead of theirs.
“Worse still, voters will be forced to vote under a court-drawn racially gerrymandered map that does not meet Alabama’s legitimate districting goals,” they wrote.
Gerrymandering involves the manipulation of the geographical boundaries of electoral districts to marginalize a certain set of voters and increase the influence of others.
The request by Alabama came amid a new and frenzied round of congressional redistricting that has unfolded across the South, as Republican-led states have scrambled to take advantage of an April Supreme Court decision that severely weakened the Voting Rights Act, a 1965 law intended to prevent discrimination in voting.
Tennessee already has approved a new map that broke up a majority-Black, Democratic-held district based in Memphis, while Louisiana is advancing a plan to eliminate one of two districts with sizable Black populations in that state.
In a rare break with Trump by members of his own party, however, several Republican state senators in South Carolina voted with Democrats on Tuesday to abandon a new map aimed at dismantling the U.S. House district held by congressman James Clyburn, a Black Democrat first elected to the seat more than three decades ago.
Litigation over Alabama’s congressional map has ricocheted between the Supreme Court and the federal three-judge panel in recent years.
Republican state legislators are trying to return to a map they approved in 2023 that the same three-judge panel previously had deemed discriminatory. That map would drop the number of districts where Black voters comprise a majority or near-majority from two to one out of the state’s seven U.S. House districts. Black people make up about a quarter of Alabama’s population.
On May 11, the Supreme Court granted the state’s request to lift the lower court’s prior ruling blocking Alabama from using the map.
In a dissent, the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices suggested that the three-judge panel could reapply its judicial block to the map preferred by Alabama Republicans, which would dismantle a U.S. House district currently represented by congressman Shomari Figures, who is Black. The three-judge panel on Tuesday did exactly that, prompting Alabama officials to go to the Supreme Court.
In a process called redistricting, the boundaries of legislative districts across the United States are reconfigured to reflect population changes as measured by the national U.S. census every 10 years. Redistricting traditionally has been carried out by state legislatures at the start of each new decade, making the mid-decade redistricting fight now unfolding highly unusual.
Trump ignited the current battle last year by pushing Republican-governed Texas to redraw its electoral map in a bid to flip five Democratic-held U.S. House seats, setting off similar efforts in a number of other Republican- and Democratic-led states.
(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)
Comments