By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON, June 2 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way on Tuesday for Alabama to use a pro-Republican congressional map that eliminates one of its two districts where Black voters make up a majority or near-majority, giving a boost to President Donald Trump as his party defends its control of Congress in November's midterm elections.
The justices halted a lower court's ruling that had blocked Alabama officials from putting in place a map that was designed to flip a U.S.
House of Representatives district currently held by a Black Democratic congressman to the Republicans.
The court's three liberal justices dissented from the decision. The court has a 6-3 conservative majority.
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 May 26 by a federal three-judge panel. That court decided that the Republican-backed map intentionally discriminated against Black voters, in violation of the U.S. Constitution's promise of equal protection under the law, and could not be used for the 2026 elections.
The Alabama Republicans argued in their filing to the Supreme Court 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.
Lawyers for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which represents a group of Black voters challenging Alabama's map, pushed back against the claim by state officials that using the lower court-approved map would inflict harm.
"States have no legitimate interest in furthering racial discrimination, including by using a map that a court has found to be a product of intentional discrimination," they said in a filing to the justices.
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 approved a new map that broke up a majority-Black, Democratic-held district based in Memphis, while Louisiana adopted a plan to eliminate one of two districts with sizable Black populations in that state.
Litigation over Alabama's congressional map has ricocheted between the Supreme Court and the federal three-judge panel in recent years.
Republican state legislators have sought 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 pursued by Alabama Republicans, which would dismantle a U.S. House district currently represented by congressman Shomari Figures, who is Black.
The three-judge panel also found that the map being pursued by Alabama likely still violated the Voting Rights Act, even under the significantly heightened legal standard announced in the Supreme Court's April ruling in the Louisiana case. After the three-judge panel imposed a new judicial block, Alabama officials took the matter 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)
