Alabama will use unconstitutional, illegally racially gerrymandered voting maps in the 2026 elections.
This is a fact.
It is a fact because nearly every person wearing a black robe and who looked at this case has admitted that this is so. That includes three federal judges who were appointed by Republicans to the bench. That includes a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court.
All of them, at one time or another, have deemed the map Alabama Republicans drew up for the 2026 election cycle to be illegal and unconstitutional. They said so on paper. With their names attached.
And then, on Tuesday, they said something completely different.
Because the Republicans are looking at an absolute bloodbath in the midterm elections and looking at an ever-increasing number of minority voters erasing old firewalls and drawing once safe red states into purple conversations, the Supreme Court said those unconstitutional maps were OK to use.
Not because the maps had changed. Not even because the laws had changed (the SCOTUS decision in Louisiana didn’t alter its decision on Alabama’s case, and the author of that opinion, Justice Samuel Alito, said so in the damn opinion).
Circumstances had changed.
So, on Tuesday evening, out plopped a steaming pile of judicial BS. An unsigned, shadow docket order allowing Alabama Republicans to use the maps that just three years ago were unconstitutional. That just a few weeks ago were barred because Milligan remained “good law.”
And so, the Republicans cheered and told stories of fairness and right. Proclaimed that race had been removed from the redistricting process. Glory be.
Off they set to pack as many Black voters as possible into a single district so as to dilute their voting power and keep them from sullying up the white man’s goals and aspirations.
You know, I think it’s the cowardice of it all that’s most disgusting.
Because it’s brimming with cowardice. It’s overflowing with scared, timid white people who are afraid to own who they truly are.
So, we get an unsigned order from the most cowardly Supreme Court in American history—a court that routinely makes inexplicable, unprecedented rulings by way of a shadow docket that removes historical responsibility. Because John Roberts does not want to be on paper the chief justice who destroyed the Voting Rights Act and rolled back American civil rights by decades.
His court’s work to fundamentally change the way the nation’s highest court views cases—through a purely partisan lens—will almost assuredly be a turning point in the nation’s history. We cannot allow this—the corruption, the cronyism, the ignoring of precedent, the incomprehensible decisions—to continue. And most of all, we can’t accept the cowardice of unsigned, dark-of-night rulings that alter important precedents without a proper record.
The cowardice does not end there, however.
All across Alabama, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s shadowy ruling, Republican lawmakers celebrated gleefully and proclaimed a deserved victory. They spoke of fairness and racial blindness.
That’s just more cowardice.
Because they know what we all know—a map packing Black voters into a single district in Alabama and diluting the Black vote elsewhere around the state is in no way fair or racially blind. It is the opposite of both.
But they’re too cowardly to say what they really mean: that they don’t care that Black people are being disenfranchised so long as they can draw maps that more likely assure their victories.
These people will look you right in the eyes and proclaim that the Supreme Court has removed race from the process, that there are no more Black districts or white districts. Forgetting, of course, that the whole reason we’re doing this is because they wanted to be able again to pack Black voters into a Black district and dilute the Black vote.
When they say they want race removed from the map-drawing process, what they mean is they want to be able to remove any race of people from any particular district without penalty.
And without consequence.
And without ever admitting publicly what we all know to be true.
