The Roberts Court Whitens Alabama’s Congressional Map, Further Decimating Black Representation and Aiding Trump

The Alito-Approved “Presumption of Legislative Good Faith” Should Not Apply to the Alabama Legislature, Given Its History of Bad Faith

This week, the Roberts Court engineered another potential victory for Donald Trump by erasing a Black-majority congressional district–led by Rep. Shomari Figures of Mobile, AL–a district the Court itself had previously approved. Before ruling in 2023 that Alabama’s illegal maps could not be used because they violated the Voting Rights Act, it had allowed those maps to remain in place for the 2022 midterms because, as of February, it was supposedly “too close” to the election to change them.

Now, that same Court has decreed that Alabama’s maps–that other courts found to be in violation of voting rights–can be deployed, quite literally, in the middle of an ongoing election.

What changed?

The personnel on the Supreme Court did not change, but the party in the White House did. In 2022, the Court’s permission to use the illegal maps helped Republicans take control of Congress and obstruct Democratic president Joe Biden’s legislative agenda. Now, in 2026, the Roberts Court is acting to help Republicans keep control of Congress. The naked partisanship is appalling.

The constitutionally-mandated 2020 census showed that the white population in Alabama shrunk to two-thirds of the state’s residents. In spite of that, the legislature drew six white-majority congressional districts out of seven. The lower courts reviewed the evidence in 2021 and found that those maps diluted the Black vote and discriminated against Black Alabamanians, so they ordered the creation of a second Black-majority district, which was affirmed by the Supreme Court in 2023 in Alabama v. Milligan.

The governor and majority-white legislature at first refused to follow that order. Some Republicans connected to Supreme Court-packer Leonard Leo said out loud that they had “intelligence” that the Roberts Court was soon going to issue rulings in other cases that would save the 2021 map that limited Black representation. Once that defiant conspiracy was outed, the state of Alabama begrudgingly created a second Black-majority district stretching from Montgomery to Mobile.

Then came the Callais ruling this April.

John Roberts handed Sam Alito the pen to gut the Voting Rights Act, while claiming the law still barred intentional discrimination against Black voters. Then the white-dominated Alabama legislature rushed to erase the new, fair maps and raced to ask the Roberts Court to block them. Roberts’s “Neo-Confederate Court,” of course, granted their wish.

While Trump acts like an obnoxious spoiled brat wanting to change the rules in the middle of the game so he can cheat to win, he’s just the front man. He’s the seedy carnival barker for the main act that is happening in the circus tent: an imperious Supreme Court hell-bent on regressing our democracy.

Roberts has had it out for the Voting Rights Act since he was a young man, and he is illegitimately using judicial power to win battles he once lost as a lawyer. In the Shelby case, he x’d out Congress’ detailed factual findings that supported pre-clearance of any changes to voting rules in states with a history of trying to thwart Black representation, like Alabama.

This week’s ruling follows the same pattern.

With the stroke of a pen, the anonymous unsigned Roberts Court opinion faulted the lower courts for failing to give Alabama a “presumption of legislative good faith.” That’s a new approach to the VRA that Sam Alito bear-hugged in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP when the Roberts Court upheld a congressional map that removed more than 20,000 Black voters from their longstanding district to pack them into one Black-majority district, despite lower court findings that this was a racial gerrymander.

With Roberts’s backing, Alito argued that this racial dilution executed with surgical precision could be excused as merely “partisan” and therefore A-OK, even though it was also quite clearly racial and intentionally so. In doing so, they simultaneously maintained an assertion that racial gerrymandering–redefined and narrowed–is still illegal.

But it’s not. Not as a practical matter, because the Roberts Six have distorted the law to declare that racially disparate effects cannot be counted in finding discrimination.

Then there is the audacity–the immorality, really–of insisting that Alabama is entitled, despite all that has happened, to a “presumption” of good faith. Alabama has demonstrably acted in bad faith and has a very long history of doing so.

However, this nightmare is on brand with what the Roberts Court is all about: fiction.

It is now routinely pretending to act in good faith when it is not, just like when John Roberts claimed that it is wrong to call this (very political) court political. What happened this week is just more grotesque legal fiction being manufactured by Roberts & Co. to advance an extreme political agenda.

It is also another example of how Roberts and Alito have been wielding judicial power to red-pencil our civil rights laws to match their own personal biases.

I’ve documented Roberts’ long-standing hostility to the Voting Rights Act, but what about Alito?

What would propel him to pollute the Voting Rights Act with the irrational notion that the federal courts must “presume good faith” by a state legislature?

The idea is antithetical to the statute itself. The VRA was enacted because the people showed and Congress found that states such as Alabama repeatedly acted in bad faith–for generations–to suppress Black political power and representation. If anything, the VRA and its proponents have a right to presume the opposite of Alito’s fiction: that Alabama’s white legislature would act in bad faith at any opportunity. And it has.

What, then, explains Alito’s view?

Some clues can be found in his own history.

Alito was born on April Fool’s Day in 1950 in Trenton, New Jersey. Back then, the city had over 120,000 residents with a growing number of Black Americans, about 11%, a percentage that would double by 1960. As industrial migration and the civil rights movement started gaining steam, Sam Alito’s parents moved to suburban Hamilton Township, where he attended public schools that were almost entirely white. At Hamilton-East Steinert High School, he helmed the all-white student council as student body president in 1968.

Years later, during the Reagan administration, while seeking a plum role in the Office of Legal Counsel, Alito wrote an essay extolling his deep loyalty to the Republican Party and to advancing Reagan’s right-wing ideological agenda. During the interview process, he identified Bill Rehnquist as the Supreme Court justice he most admired. Rehnquist was John Roberts’ mentor and the most anti-voting-rights justice on the Court at that time.

In that same essay, Alito also specifically highlighted his hostility to the abortion ruling of the Burger Court and to the “apportionment” rulings of the Warren Court.

Though they do not come up often these days, the apportionment cases were vital to early efforts to dismantle systems of political inequality that helped keep Southern legislatures segregated. In cases like Reynolds v. Sims, the Warren Court found that Alabama was violating the Constitution by not apportioning legislative districts to have roughly equal populations, limiting Black representation.

The Warren Court’s findings in such cases were premised on the Constitution’s command that “representation in the legislature shall be based upon population,” and the American principles President Abraham Lincoln beautifully exalted: “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” The apportionment cases extol and protect the importance of “one person, one vote.” Accordingly, the Warren Court required states to redraw maps that invidiously discriminated by systematically diluting Black representation and entrenching white rule.

One justice, John Marshall Harlan II, dissented and would have let the states continue to use such racially biased maps. That is who Alito said he admired.

And that is who Alito still is. Just like Roberts, his regressive views are rigidly frozen in amber from decades ago.

Despite the promises Roberts and Alito made as judicial nominees–that they would faithfully follow precedent and act as humble judges who would not usurp Congress’s power–they do the opposite, repeatedly.

The Roberts Court is an aggressive and growing blight on America’s ability to function as a representative democracy, to secure liberty and justice for all.

It is not functioning like an independent tribunal devoted to fair interpretation, but more like the unaccountable arm of a political party. We must reform the Roberts Court and limit its power. Until we do so, it will continue to dismantle our rights.

---

What I’m (Re)Reading:

• Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws that Changed America by Nick Kotz

  • As one of my heroes, Jimmy Carter, observed in reading this book: it “brings new insights about enormous breakthroughs for the cause of equality and justice … at a time when it is imperative that we renew the fight for a more perfect union.”

• Medgar & Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America by Joy-Ann Reid

  • This details the struggle against violent white supremacists who sought to block Black Americans from voting and the racist fiends who assassinated Medgar Evans and other civil rights heroes.

• The 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, which were written to secure equal rights, including voting rights, in our democratic republic.