Less Than a Week After SCOTUS Gutted the Voting Rights Act, Alabama and Tennessee Are Already Redrawing Their Maps. The Targets Are Black-Majority Districts.
The big picture: Last week, the Supreme Court flipped Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act on its head. This week, Alabama and Tennessee are racing to redraw their congressional maps in emergency special sessions. Alabama’s attorney general filed his motion the day after the SCOTUS ruling. Together the two states are eyeing up to three new Republican U.S. House seats. Nobody is pretending this is about anything else.
Why it matters: The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation in American history, passed precisely because Black Americans in southern states were being systematically blocked from political power. What’s happening this week is a live test of what U.S. elections look like with Section 2 effectively defanged.
Alabama moves first
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall filed motions the day after the Louisiana decision, looking to appeal the rulings that had blocked GOP-drawn maps from 2023. Those court-ordered maps were supposed to be locked in until after the 2030 Census. They may not survive the week.
Governor Kay Ivey says the special session will wrap within five days. Republicans currently hold five of Alabama’s seven House seats, and they say new maps would give them a “fighting chance” at two more. Marshall added that with Alabama’s primaries on May 19, the timing is “critically important.” Which is basically code for: if the courts don’t bless this fast, they’re stuck. For Democrats hoping to slow this down, that tight window might actually be their best ally.
Tennessee goes after Memphis
Tennessee is running the same play with a slightly different angle. Governor Bill Lee’s special session kicks off tomorrow, and the target is District 9, currently the only Democratic-held seat in the state. The VRA was the main thing keeping District 9 intact. With that protection weakened, Republicans see a clear path to a sweep of Tennessee’s House delegation.
This isn’t new behavior. In 2022, Tennessee Republicans carved Nashville into three pieces and flipped the 5th District. Now they’re eyeing Memphis, the most heavily Black city in the state. BUT Tennessee has a timing problem its own lawyers are openly worried about. The candidate qualifying period ended in March. Primaries hit in August. Democrats are hoping courts simply rule it’s too close to election day to bulldoze the map.
Lee, for his part, is calling it a representation issue, saying “we owe it to Tennesseans to ensure our congressional districts accurately reflect the will of Tennessee voters.” Fine. The question is whose will gets reflected when the one district you’re specifically targeting is the one anchored in a majority-Black city.
“A Jim Crow method”
Black lawmakers and civil rights groups are not being subtle about what they think this is. Senator Raphael Warnock said the redistricting fight is a continuation of the effort to roll back the Civil Rights Movement, calling it a “Jim Crow method.” Alabama Representative Shomari Figures warned even before the SCOTUS ruling that gutting Section 2 would “drastically reduce the number of realistic opportunities to elect Black members to Congress.” Alabama Democrats are now calling the special session “a blatant power grab by Republican leadership in Montgomery to eliminate seats held by Black Democrats.”
You can disagree with the framing. BUT the timing and the targets make it hard to argue with the read. The Louisiana ruling drops, and within days two southern states are moving on map-drawing, and the districts they’re moving on are the ones with the most Black voters.
The bigger picture
Alabama and Tennessee aren’t happening in a vacuum. Virginia just held a redistricting referendum where politicians broke spending records and one side resorted to running ads featuring Klan imagery. Florida pushed through new maps before the public could even see them, with Hakeem Jeffries telling Republicans to “F” around and find out. Louisiana fully suspended its primaries after votes had already been cast, because the courts dismantled the map underneath them.
You can think gerrymandering is just hardball politics, both parties do it, that’s the game. Defensible take. BUT what’s happening right now is a different animal. This is redistricting being done in real time, post-ruling, with primaries actively underway, targeting specifically the districts that had the strongest legal protection for minority voters, because that protection just got removed.
By the numbers
1 - day between the SCOTUS ruling and Alabama’s AG filing
5 - days the Alabama special session is expected to last
3 - potential new GOP House seats from Alabama and Tennessee combined
5 of 7 - Alabama House seats Republicans currently hold
1 - Democratic-held House seat in Tennessee, now the target
May 19 - Alabama’s primary date
The bottom line
If these maps go through and survive court challenges, the country’s congressional makeup heading into 2027 could be locked in by maps drawn in a five-day sprint by state legislatures racing to beat their own primary calendars. “Free and fair election” is doing a lot of heavy lifting lately. We’re going to find out in November how much weight it can actually carry.
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