Alabama Legislature to begin special session with redistricting possible

The Alabama Legislature will begin a special session Monday afternoon that could lead to new congressional and legislative maps — if the U.S. Supreme Court allows it.

Gov. Kay Ivey called the special session on Friday, bowing to mounting pressure from Alabama Republicans pushing to eliminate the two congressional districts currently represented by Democratic U.S. Reps. Terri Sewell and Birmingham and Shomari Figures of Mobile.

The move came after the U.S. Supreme Court significantly weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bans racial discrimination in voting practices. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion made it significantly harder to challenge districts on the basis of racial discrimination.  Alabama is currently under an injunction barring it from redrawing the state’s congressional maps until 2030. Attorney General Steve Marshall filed an emergency petition with the U.S. Supreme Court Thursday seeking to have the injunction dissolved.

“By calling the Legislature into a special session, I am ensuring Alabama is prepared should the courts act quickly enough to allow Alabama’s previously drawn congressional and state senate maps to be used during this election cycle,” Ivey said in her Friday statement. “If the court-ordered injunction is lifted, Alabama would revert to the maps drawn by the Legislature for congressional districts in 2023 and state senate districts in 2021.”

A panel of three federal judges that included two appointed by President Donald Trump ruled those maps unconstitutional, citing Alabama’s racially polarized voting, in which white Alabamians tend to support Republicans and Black Alabamians tend to support Democrats. The justices wrote that to allow Black voters a chance to elect their preferred leaders, the state had to draw one majority-minority district — which the state has had since 1992 — and an additional majority or near-majority district.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the lower court in 2023, ordering the Legislature to draw a new map. The Legislature in a special session submitted a map that drew sharp criticism from the judges, who said the state was defying its instructions. A special master ended up drawing a new map.

The special session would set special elections “in districts whose boundary lines are altered by a court issuing a judgment, vacating an injunction, or otherwise ordering or permitting an alteration in the boundaries of such districts.”

Ivey’s statement Friday suggested that the Legislature would eliminate Figures’ seat and redraw two Montgomery-area state Senate districts that a federal judge last year found to be violating Section 2. But in a joint statement Friday afternoon, House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter, R-Rainsville and Senate President Pro Tem Garlan Gudger, R-Cullman suggested that the Republican-controlled Legislature would go after Sewell’s district as well.

“While there are no guarantees that Alabama’s now unlawful, court mandated roadblock will be removed in time, we have a responsibility to give our state a fighting chance to send seven Republican members to Congress,” the statement said.

In the Callais ruling, Alito appeared to draw distinctions between the Callais ruling and Allen v. Milligan, the 2023 decision that led to Alabama’s congressional maps being redrawn, saying Alabama’s case was about an evidentiary standard.

Democrats and civil rights groups Friday denounced the attempt to eliminate the districts and promised to fight.

“Now, the state is essentially asking the courts to close their eyes and forget what they already saw,” Figures said in a statement. “This same Supreme Court has already upheld the findings in this case once, and we are confident the courts will uphold the law again.”

Sewell said in a statement Friday that Republican state leaders were “desperate to revert us back to a map that silences our voices, dilutes our power, and denies us a fair seat at the table.”

“We will not take this sitting down,” she said. “Our communities are prepared to organize, mobilize and demand the fair representation that we as Alabama voters deserve. Bring it on.”

As of Friday evening, the Supreme Court had not ruled on Marshall’s petition.

Alabama Reflector is a nonprofit news agency in Montgomery.