It’s one thing for the Supreme Court to not explain its decisions, but it’s a whole other level to refuse to explain a decision that contradicts a written decision from just over a month ago.
The quick timeline is this. The Supreme Court allowed Louisiana to draw racist maps, but specifically explained that this didn’t change its earlier decision blocking Alabama’s maps as a racist bridge too far. Alabama responded with, “please!” Then the Supreme Court issued an unexplained shadow docket ruling asking the lower court to decide if the Callais opinion that explicitly said this does not change the situation in Alabama had changed the situation in Alabama. The lower court said it did not. And now — with the election already underway — the Supreme Court put out another unexplained ruling that, “just kidding, Alabama is allowed to install those maps we agreed were too racist 3 years ago and in fact can do so right now.”
Cutting through the bullshit that the majority’s sycophants will spin, what happened is pretty simple. The majority liked the playbook Louisiana laid out for diluting the state’s Black voters into inconsequence. But the Alabama ruling presented an obstacle to the Callais case that the conservatives couldn’t write their way around. So the Callais opinion — which they had to explain — affirms the earlier Alabama decision and tells the reader that nothing about Callais changes that. Then, a few weeks later, with the benefit of the shadow docket, the Court junks the Alabama decision without having to come up with an explanation why.
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Because, to borrow from Love Story, the shadow docket means never having to say you’re basing this on any law.
As an added twist that Aaron Sorkin would dismiss as too heavy-handed of a liberal fantasy, Alabama needed the Supreme Court’s emergency action after blowing its own June 1 deadline because “state and county administrative offices are closed today, June 1, to celebrate the birthday of Jefferson Davis.” They couldn’t get the racist maps installed in time for the 2026 midterms because they were too busy kicking back to toast the Confederacy. Luckily for them, the Supreme Court is not going to let that stand in the way.
Declaring these maps “racist” is not hyperbole. The record in the case is damning. The district court held an 11-day trial, heard 51 witnesses, reviewed nearly 800 exhibits, and produced a 268-page opinion. The court found Alabama had intentionally discriminated against Black voters, described a record “replete with sharp departures” from the state’s own traditional districting rules, and noted the legislature had conjured findings out of “thin air” in “the dead of night.” There’s a reason even John Roberts balked at these maps 3 years ago. Most importantly, it grounded the holding in an independent Fourteenth Amendment finding of intentional discrimination — the constitutional rationale Callais went out of its way to explicitly declare that it did not reach.
Don’t let this get undersold: the majority, if one takes its own reasoning in Callais at face value, just adopted a new standard for Fourteenth Amendment without even attempting to mount an explanation. The Supreme Court said Alabama was “likely to succeed on the merits” in its Fourteenth Amendment fight — despite Alabama having lost that battle under existing law already — and offered no further analysis for this change.
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Thus, Alabama succeeds in this case running the only strategy it’s known for the last century and a half: if you lose, just pretend you didn’t long enough until “The South Shall Rise Again.”
Unlike the earlier post-Callais shadow docket order, the majority resisted the temptation to even acknowledge the lengthy and detailed dissent. In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor repeats a warning from her dissent to the original order remanding this case to the district court last month:
As I have explained, “[t]hese cases are, of course, Allen,” so if the majority meant what it said in Callais and “Allen is good law . . . , then it must be good law here.”
Which is exactly why the majority waited for the shadow docket. It relieves the burden of having to slap lipstick on this pig.
Because the record in this case presented a challenge for even the highly toned cynicism muscles of the majority. As Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern explain in Slate:
In reality, the Alabama map was determined, over many years and many pages of fact-finding, to have been a product of intentional discrimination. For instance, the state admitted that it had tried to keep residents with “European heritage” (that is, white people) in the same district while aggressively slicing up nonwhite communities into different districts. Under the new regime, the Roberts court’s conservatives don’t care. In fact, Tuesday’s order expressly approved of the state’s desire to keep those white voters together while divvying up Black voters to prevent the latter group from electing their preferred representative. It is now open season on minority voters in any state that seeks to crowd them out of their voting booths. In killing the sole remaining remedy for blatantly racist gerrymanders, the court has goosed the cynical partisan voting wars even further.
The “partisan voting wars” is the whole ballgame here. Roberts didn’t see fit to help Alabama Republicans 3 years ago because there wasn’t a political need to secure an extra “European heritage” district. But that was before California decided that it would let its voters approve a highly partisan map to counteract Texas redrawing its maps. The Supreme Court opened the door to purely partisan gerrymandering, assuming the Democrats would refuse to play on principle. For several years, they were right. But now that the free-for-all is on, Republicans have run into a roadblock. The Voting Rights Act and the body of constitutional protections against racial disenfranchisement create an outer bound to what maps a heavily Republican state government can draw. In the past, with a state like Wisconsin, the GOP could — and did — draw itself a caricature of partisan gerrymandering. But in the Deep South, eking out those last few additional seats require carving up Black communities in ways the Constitution doesn’t allow.
At least, it didn’t.
If states don’t have to protect racial minorities from having their neighborhoods broken up to diminish their voices, the last limit on GOP gerrymandering is gone. And the majority on the Court isn’t willing to wait until 2028 to free up their fellow conservative activists. After years of lecturing lower courts about the Purcell principle — the doctrine that judges shouldn’t change election rules close to an election lest voters get confused — the doctrine just got waved away to avoid punishing a state for celebrating Jefferson Davis Day. Justice Jackson calls this majority’s executive power rulings “Calvinball with a twist,” and that seems to extend to the Purcell principle too. The Court invoked Purcell to protect the Texas gerrymander, deeming a challenge four months out too close to the wire. Since then it’s turned around and endorsed gerrymanders in Louisiana and now Alabama after voting already started. When the shoe was on the other foot in this case, Alabama claimed that reassigning voters back to the old maps would take months and now they contend it can be accomplished in days. Purcell isn’t really a principle as much as public relations copy.
The public increasingly sees the Supreme Court as a collection of nakedly political actors and the conservatives aren’t happy about that. But using the shadow docket specifically to refuse to defend a decision to rewrite election laws to help Republicans win? Man, you’re never going to beat the “they’re just political actors” charges that way.
(Opinion on the next page…)
The Supreme Court Just Transformed Its Horrible Voting Rights Ruling Into Something More Calamitous [Slate]
Order in Allen v. Caster (No. 25A1314) [Supreme Court of the United States]
Earlier: John Roberts Thinks Alabama Maps He Decided Were Too Racist Magically Aren’t So Racist Anymore!
John Roberts Decides Voting Rights Already Weak Enough For Him In Latest Supreme Court Ruling
Supreme Court Shadow Docket Just Throwing Darts At Democracy At This Point
Supreme Court’s Shadow Docket Scam Collides With Reality
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.