{"id":153718,"date":"2026-06-03T15:32:48","date_gmt":"2026-06-03T23:32:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/06\/03\/supreme-court-republicans-refuse-to-explain-why-alabama-can-now-use-racist-election-maps-but-please-dont-think-theyre-just-being-political-about-it\/"},"modified":"2026-06-03T15:32:48","modified_gmt":"2026-06-03T23:32:48","slug":"supreme-court-republicans-refuse-to-explain-why-alabama-can-now-use-racist-election-maps-but-please-dont-think-theyre-just-being-political-about-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/06\/03\/supreme-court-republicans-refuse-to-explain-why-alabama-can-now-use-racist-election-maps-but-please-dont-think-theyre-just-being-political-about-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court Republicans Refuse To Explain Why Alabama Can Now Use Racist Election Maps (But PLEASE Don\u2019t Think They\u2019re Just Being Political About It)"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s one thing for the Supreme Court to not explain its decisions, but it\u2019s a whole other level to refuse to explain a decision that contradicts a written decision from just over a month ago<\/em>. <\/p>\n

The quick timeline is this. The Supreme Court allowed Louisiana to draw racist maps, but specifically explained that this didn\u2019t change its earlier decision blocking Alabama\u2019s maps as a racist bridge too far. Alabama responded with, \u201cplease!\u201d Then the Supreme Court issued an unexplained shadow docket ruling<\/a> asking the lower court to decide if the Callais<\/em> opinion that explicitly said this does not change the situation in Alabama<\/em> had changed the situation in Alabama. The lower court said it did not. And now \u2014 with the election already underway \u2014 the Supreme Court put out another unexplained ruling<\/a> that, \u201cjust kidding, Alabama is allowed to install those maps we agreed were too racist 3 years ago and in fact can do so right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cutting through the bullshit that the majority\u2019s sycophants will spin, what happened is pretty simple. The majority liked the playbook Louisiana laid out for diluting the state\u2019s Black voters into inconsequence. But the Alabama ruling presented an obstacle to the Callais<\/em> case that the conservatives couldn\u2019t write their way around. So the Callais<\/em> opinion \u2014 which they had to explain \u2014 affirms the earlier Alabama decision and tells the reader that nothing about Callais<\/em> changes that. Then, a few weeks later, with the benefit of the shadow docket, the Court junks the Alabama decision without having to come up with an explanation why.<\/p>\n

Because, to borrow from Love Story<\/em>, the shadow docket means never having to say you\u2019re basing this on any law.<\/p>\n

As an added twist that Aaron Sorkin would dismiss as too heavy-handed of a liberal fantasy, Alabama needed the Supreme Court\u2019s emergency action after blowing its own June 1 deadline because \u201cstate and county administrative offices are closed today, June 1, to celebrate the birthday of Jefferson Davis<\/a>.\u201d They couldn\u2019t get the racist maps installed in time for the 2026 midterms because they were too busy kicking back to toast the Confederacy. Luckily for them, the Supreme Court is not going to let that stand in the way.<\/p>\n

Declaring these maps \u201cracist\u201d is not hyperbole. The record in the case is damning. The district court held an 11-day trial, heard 51 witnesses, reviewed nearly 800 exhibits, and produced a 268-page opinion. The court found Alabama had intentionally discriminated against Black voters, described a record \u201creplete with sharp departures\u201d from the state\u2019s own traditional districting rules, and noted the legislature had conjured findings out of \u201cthin air\u201d in \u201cthe dead of night.\u201d There\u2019s a reason even John Roberts balked at these maps 3 years ago. Most importantly, it grounded the holding in an independent<\/em> Fourteenth Amendment finding of intentional discrimination \u2014 the constitutional rationale Callais<\/em> went out of its way to explicitly declare that it did not reach.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t let this get undersold: the majority, if one takes its own reasoning in Callais<\/em> at face value, just adopted a new standard for Fourteenth Amendment without even attempting to mount an explanation. The Supreme Court said Alabama was \u201clikely to succeed on the merits\u201d in its Fourteenth Amendment fight \u2014 despite Alabama having lost that battle under existing law already \u2014 and offered no further analysis for this change. <\/p>\n

Thus, Alabama succeeds in this case running the only strategy it\u2019s known for the last century and a half: if you lose, just pretend you didn\u2019t long enough until \u201cThe South Shall Rise Again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike the earlier post-Callais<\/em> shadow docket order<\/a>, the majority resisted the temptation to even acknowledge the lengthy and detailed dissent. In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor repeats a warning from her dissent to the original order remanding this case to the district court last month:<\/p>\n

\n

As I have explained, \u201c[t]hese cases are, of course, Allen<\/em>,\u201d so if the majority meant what it said in Callais<\/em> and \u201cAllen <\/em>is good law . . . , then it must be good law here.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Which is exactly why the majority waited for the shadow docket. It relieves the burden of having to slap lipstick on this pig.<\/p>\n

Because the record in this case presented a challenge for even the highly toned cynicism muscles of the majority. As Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern explain in Slate<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

In reality, the Alabama map was determined, over many years and many pages of fact-finding, to have been a product of intentional discrimination. For instance,\u00a0the state admitted<\/a>\u00a0that it had tried to keep residents with \u201cEuropean heritage\u201d (that is, white people) in the same district while aggressively slicing up nonwhite communities into different districts. Under the new regime, the Roberts court\u2019s conservatives don\u2019t care. In fact, Tuesday\u2019s order expressly\u00a0approved<\/em>\u00a0of the state\u2019s desire to keep those white voters together while divvying up Black voters to prevent the latter group from electing their preferred representative. It is now open season on minority voters in any state that seeks to crowd them out of their voting booths. In killing the sole remaining remedy for blatantly racist gerrymanders, the court has goosed the cynical partisan voting wars even further.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The \u201cpartisan voting wars\u201d is the whole ballgame here. Roberts didn\u2019t see fit to help Alabama Republicans 3 years ago because there wasn\u2019t a political need to secure an extra \u201cEuropean heritage\u201d district. But that was before California decided that it would let its voters approve a highly partisan map to counteract Texas redrawing its maps. The Supreme Court opened the door to purely partisan gerrymandering, assuming the Democrats would refuse to play on principle. For several years, they were right. But now that the free-for-all is on, Republicans have run into a roadblock. The Voting Rights Act and the body of constitutional protections against racial disenfranchisement create an outer bound to what maps a heavily Republican state government can draw. In the past, with a state like Wisconsin, the GOP could \u2014 and did \u2014 draw itself a caricature of partisan gerrymandering. But in the Deep South, eking out those last few additional seats require carving up Black communities in ways the Constitution doesn\u2019t allow.<\/p>\n

At least, it didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

If states don\u2019t have to protect racial minorities from having their neighborhoods broken up to diminish their voices, the last limit on GOP gerrymandering is gone. And the majority on the Court isn\u2019t willing to wait until 2028 to free up their fellow conservative activists. After years of lecturing lower courts about the Purcell<\/em> principle<\/a> \u2014 the doctrine that judges shouldn\u2019t change election rules close to an election lest voters get confused \u2014 the doctrine just got waved away to avoid punishing a state for celebrating Jefferson Davis Day. Justice Jackson calls this majority\u2019s executive power rulings \u201cCalvinball with a twist,\u201d and that seems to extend to the Purcell<\/em> principle too. The Court invoked Purcell<\/em> to protect<\/em> the Texas gerrymander, deeming a challenge four months out too close to the wire. Since then it\u2019s turned around and endorsed gerrymanders in Louisiana and now Alabama after voting already started. When the shoe was on the other foot in this case, Alabama claimed that reassigning voters back to the old maps would take months and now they contend it can be accomplished in days. Purcell<\/em> isn\u2019t really a principle as much as public relations copy. <\/p>\n

The public increasingly sees the Supreme Court as a collection of nakedly political actors and the conservatives aren\u2019t happy about that<\/a>. But using the shadow docket specifically to refuse to defend a decision to rewrite election laws to help Republicans win<\/em>? Man, you\u2019re never going to beat the \u201cthey\u2019re just political actors\u201d charges that way.<\/p>\n

(Opinion on the next page\u2026)<\/em><\/p>\n

The Supreme Court Just Transformed Its Horrible Voting Rights Ruling Into Something More Calamitous<\/a> [Slate]
Order in Allen v. Caster<\/em> (No. 25A1314)<\/a> [Supreme Court of the United States]<\/p>\n

Earlier<\/strong>: John Roberts Thinks Alabama Maps He Decided Were Too Racist Magically Aren\u2019t So Racist Anymore!<\/a>
John Roberts Decides Voting Rights Already Weak Enough For Him In Latest Supreme Court Ruling<\/a>
Supreme Court Shadow Docket Just Throwing Darts At Democracy At This Point<\/a>
Supreme Court\u2019s Shadow Docket Scam Collides With Reality<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The post Supreme Court Republicans Refuse To Explain Why Alabama Can Now Use Racist Election Maps (But PLEASE Don\u2019t Think They\u2019re Just Being Political About It)<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s one thing for the Supreme Court to not explain its decisions, but it\u2019s a whole other level to refuse to explain a decision that contradicts a written decision from just over a month ago<\/em>. <\/p>\n

The quick timeline is this. The Supreme Court allowed Louisiana to draw racist maps, but specifically explained that this didn\u2019t change its earlier decision blocking Alabama\u2019s maps as a racist bridge too far. Alabama responded with, \u201cplease!\u201d Then the Supreme Court issued an unexplained shadow docket ruling<\/a> asking the lower court to decide if the Callais<\/em> opinion that explicitly said this does not change the situation in Alabama<\/em> had changed the situation in Alabama. The lower court said it did not. And now \u2014 with the election already underway \u2014 the Supreme Court put out another unexplained ruling<\/a> that, \u201cjust kidding, Alabama is allowed to install those maps we agreed were too racist 3 years ago and in fact can do so right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cutting through the bullshit that the majority\u2019s sycophants will spin, what happened is pretty simple. The majority liked the playbook Louisiana laid out for diluting the state\u2019s Black voters into inconsequence. But the Alabama ruling presented an obstacle to the Callais<\/em> case that the conservatives couldn\u2019t write their way around. So the Callais<\/em> opinion \u2014 which they had to explain \u2014 affirms the earlier Alabama decision and tells the reader that nothing about Callais<\/em> changes that. Then, a few weeks later, with the benefit of the shadow docket, the Court junks the Alabama decision without having to come up with an explanation why.<\/p>\n

Because, to borrow from Love Story<\/em>, the shadow docket means never having to say you\u2019re basing this on any law.<\/p>\n

As an added twist that Aaron Sorkin would dismiss as too heavy-handed of a liberal fantasy, Alabama needed the Supreme Court\u2019s emergency action after blowing its own June 1 deadline because \u201cstate and county administrative offices are closed today, June 1, to celebrate the birthday of Jefferson Davis<\/a>.\u201d They couldn\u2019t get the racist maps installed in time for the 2026 midterms because they were too busy kicking back to toast the Confederacy. Luckily for them, the Supreme Court is not going to let that stand in the way.<\/p>\n

Declaring these maps \u201cracist\u201d is not hyperbole. The record in the case is damning. The district court held an 11-day trial, heard 51 witnesses, reviewed nearly 800 exhibits, and produced a 268-page opinion. The court found Alabama had intentionally discriminated against Black voters, described a record \u201creplete with sharp departures\u201d from the state\u2019s own traditional districting rules, and noted the legislature had conjured findings out of \u201cthin air\u201d in \u201cthe dead of night.\u201d There\u2019s a reason even John Roberts balked at these maps 3 years ago. Most importantly, it grounded the holding in an independent<\/em> Fourteenth Amendment finding of intentional discrimination \u2014 the constitutional rationale Callais<\/em> went out of its way to explicitly declare that it did not reach.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t let this get undersold: the majority, if one takes its own reasoning in Callais<\/em> at face value, just adopted a new standard for Fourteenth Amendment without even attempting to mount an explanation. The Supreme Court said Alabama was \u201clikely to succeed on the merits\u201d in its Fourteenth Amendment fight \u2014 despite Alabama having lost that battle under existing law already \u2014 and offered no further analysis for this change. <\/p>\n

Thus, Alabama succeeds in this case running the only strategy it\u2019s known for the last century and a half: if you lose, just pretend you didn\u2019t long enough until \u201cThe South Shall Rise Again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike the earlier post-Callais<\/em> shadow docket order<\/a>, the majority resisted the temptation to even acknowledge the lengthy and detailed dissent. In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor repeats a warning from her dissent to the original order remanding this case to the district court last month:<\/p>\n

\n

As I have explained, \u201c[t]hese cases are, of course, Allen<\/em>,\u201d so if the majority meant what it said in Callais<\/em> and \u201cAllen <\/em>is good law . . . , then it must be good law here.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Which is exactly why the majority waited for the shadow docket. It relieves the burden of having to slap lipstick on this pig.<\/p>\n

Because the record in this case presented a challenge for even the highly toned cynicism muscles of the majority. As Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern explain in Slate<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

In reality, the Alabama map was determined, over many years and many pages of fact-finding, to have been a product of intentional discrimination. For instance,\u00a0the state admitted<\/a>\u00a0that it had tried to keep residents with \u201cEuropean heritage\u201d (that is, white people) in the same district while aggressively slicing up nonwhite communities into different districts. Under the new regime, the Roberts court\u2019s conservatives don\u2019t care. In fact, Tuesday\u2019s order expressly\u00a0approved<\/em>\u00a0of the state\u2019s desire to keep those white voters together while divvying up Black voters to prevent the latter group from electing their preferred representative. It is now open season on minority voters in any state that seeks to crowd them out of their voting booths. In killing the sole remaining remedy for blatantly racist gerrymanders, the court has goosed the cynical partisan voting wars even further.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The \u201cpartisan voting wars\u201d is the whole ballgame here. Roberts didn\u2019t see fit to help Alabama Republicans 3 years ago because there wasn\u2019t a political need to secure an extra \u201cEuropean heritage\u201d district. But that was before California decided that it would let its voters approve a highly partisan map to counteract Texas redrawing its maps. The Supreme Court opened the door to purely partisan gerrymandering, assuming the Democrats would refuse to play on principle. For several years, they were right. But now that the free-for-all is on, Republicans have run into a roadblock. The Voting Rights Act and the body of constitutional protections against racial disenfranchisement create an outer bound to what maps a heavily Republican state government can draw. In the past, with a state like Wisconsin, the GOP could \u2014 and did \u2014 draw itself a caricature of partisan gerrymandering. But in the Deep South, eking out those last few additional seats require carving up Black communities in ways the Constitution doesn\u2019t allow.<\/p>\n

At least, it didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

If states don\u2019t have to protect racial minorities from having their neighborhoods broken up to diminish their voices, the last limit on GOP gerrymandering is gone. And the majority on the Court isn\u2019t willing to wait until 2028 to free up their fellow conservative activists. After years of lecturing lower courts about the Purcell<\/em> principle<\/a> \u2014 the doctrine that judges shouldn\u2019t change election rules close to an election lest voters get confused \u2014 the doctrine just got waved away to avoid punishing a state for celebrating Jefferson Davis Day. Justice Jackson calls this majority\u2019s executive power rulings \u201cCalvinball with a twist,\u201d and that seems to extend to the Purcell<\/em> principle too. The Court invoked Purcell<\/em> to protect<\/em> the Texas gerrymander, deeming a challenge four months out too close to the wire. Since then it\u2019s turned around and endorsed gerrymanders in Louisiana and now Alabama after voting already started. When the shoe was on the other foot in this case, Alabama claimed that reassigning voters back to the old maps would take months and now they contend it can be accomplished in days. Purcell<\/em> isn\u2019t really a principle as much as public relations copy. <\/p>\n

The public increasingly sees the Supreme Court as a collection of nakedly political actors and the conservatives aren\u2019t happy about that<\/a>. But using the shadow docket specifically to refuse to defend a decision to rewrite election laws to help Republicans win<\/em>? Man, you\u2019re never going to beat the \u201cthey\u2019re just political actors\u201d charges that way.<\/p>\n

(Opinion on the next page\u2026)<\/em><\/p>\n

The Supreme Court Just Transformed Its Horrible Voting Rights Ruling Into Something More Calamitous<\/a> [Slate]
Order in Allen v. Caster<\/em> (No. 25A1314)<\/a> [Supreme Court of the United States]<\/p>\n

Earlier<\/strong>: John Roberts Thinks Alabama Maps He Decided Were Too Racist Magically Aren\u2019t So Racist Anymore!<\/a>
John Roberts Decides Voting Rights Already Weak Enough For Him In Latest Supreme Court Ruling<\/a>
Supreme Court Shadow Docket Just Throwing Darts At Democracy At This Point<\/a>
Supreme Court\u2019s Shadow Docket Scam Collides With Reality<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The post Supreme Court Republicans Refuse To Explain Why Alabama Can Now Use Racist Election Maps (But PLEASE Don\u2019t Think They\u2019re Just Being Political About It)<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s one thing for the Supreme Court to not explain its decisions, but it\u2019s a whole other level to refuse to explain a decision that contradicts a written decision from just over a month ago. The quick timeline is this. The Supreme Court allowed Louisiana to draw racist maps, but specifically explained that this didn\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-153718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153718\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}