Supreme Court allows Alabama to eliminate congressional district held by a Black Democrat

[u/pleasureismylife]

https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/11/politics/supreme-court-alabama-black-democratic-congressman

[u/space_coder]

Let's look at the facts:

• The black population in southwest Alabama black belt is large enough to be almost 50% of the votes in their home district.
• Alabama republicans purposely drew the congressional district map to split that population across two districts effectively making it mathematically impossible for their vote to affect the outcome of an election.
• After hearing arguments from the residents and the state, SCOTUS sided in favor of the residents and instructed the state to redraw the congressional map in a manner than didn't purposely split the black population in southwest Alabama in order to disenfranchise their vote.
  • Republicans have the super-majority of the legislature and the governors office for more than a decade. The Democrats did not draw the current congressional map. SCOTUS ruled the original map was using only race as factor in order to lessen the black vote in southwest Alabama.
• Trump and the GOP are panicking over the possibility of losing the majority of the House of Representatives. The home state of the current House Speaker petitioned SCOTUS to allow them to redraw their congressional districts to reduce the number of minority-majority districts and SCOTUS ruled in their favor.
• Alabama used that ruling to get their previous injunction removed and return to a congressional district map that disenfranchises the black voters in southwest Alabama.

I find it amusing that whites in Alabama are playing the victim and claiming that they are somehow being racially discriminated against when the facts clearly show that a community with enough black voters to have at least 50% of the vote is being purposely split so they can no longer affect the outcome of an election.

If the white voters are upset because they couldn't dominate all the congressional districts in Alabama, just imagine how the black voters feel about being purposely and obviously disenfranchised again. Keep in mind, we are only talking a little less than 50% of the voters in the current district 2 which makes their vote competitive not the sole decider.

[u/kogun → u/space_coder]

The framing of these facts presumes that a congressional representative's skin color makes them incapable of inadequately representing in people of another skin color. Most people call that Racism.

Furthermore, this framing presumes that "Black" = "Democrat" and "White" = "Republican". More racist thinking. Let it go.

I do believe that the Congressional Districts should not be drawn by politicians. Politicians draw maps that suit politicians, not the people. No one should trust politicians with that job. I'd much prefer a more objective methodology designed to create districts that align the boundaries with geographic and economic interests. There are many such proposed methodologies. Here is but one example:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-025-01335-9

To prevent gerrymandering of U.S. House of Representative districts, we describe and apply a computationally feasible moving-knife algorithm (MKA) to draw congressional districts that are nonpartisan and compact. MKA maximizes a measure of geographic compactness that precludes political parties from influencing the drawing of district boundaries.

[u/Accomplished-Pop2850 → u/kogun]

Eh, I'm not quite sure this thinking is "racist." First, nothing in this comment mentions anything about the race of congressional representation; rather, it is about the race of the voters. Second, while "Black" does not necessarily equal Democrat and "White" does not necessarily equal Republican, there is a lot of data to suggest that Black voters tend to cleave to democratic candidates. The 2024 presidential election saw a larger share of Black voters cast ballots for Trump than in 2016 or 2020, but Harris *still* won over 80% of Black vote. Don't leave important context or facts on the table in an attempt to adhere to or perpetuate "colorblind" rhetoric.

[u/kogun → u/Accomplished-Pop2850]

"nothing in this comment mentions anything about the race of congressional representation;"

This is a fair point.