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A federal court is trying to pull a judicial mulligan after the Supreme Court gave Alabama another shot at using its GOP-backed congressional map.
The Supreme Court threw out a lower-court order barring Alabama from using the congressional map the state adopted in 2023 and sent the dispute back to the lower court for another look. But a three-judge federal panel again blocked Alabama from using that map for the 2026 midterms.
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A U.S. judge on Thursday declined to immediately block President Donald Trump’s executive order tightening rules on mail-in voting, but left the door open for the Democratic Party to challenge it again after the administration takes further steps to implement the measure.
Washington-based U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols wrote that the Democrats’ request for a preliminary injunction blocking Trump’s March 31 order, which directed his administration to compile a list of confirmed U.S. citizens eligible to vote in each state, was premature. The decision did not address whether Trump’s executive order was lawful.
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A woman casts her ballot at a polling station in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on November 3, 2024.Kamil KrzaczynskI/AFP/Getty
The Voting Rights Act is widely considered one of the most effective laws in prohibiting racial discrimination in voting. One of its key provisions has long allowed states to take race into account when drawing voting maps to ensure that nonwhite voters have electoral power. But earlier this year, the Supreme Court narrowed that provision. In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan described the court’s decision as the “now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”
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If you were looking for a pathetic excuse for what qualifies as a “statesman” these days, look no further than the so-called “red state” of South Carolina.
In complete defiance of their voters’ wishes, a cabal of Republican state senators sided with Democrats on Tuesday in tanking a proposal that sought to redistrict South Carolina’s lone Democrat congressional seat ahead of the 2026 midterms. The Democrat seat is currently held by longtime Rep. Jim Clyburn, a former member of the U.S. House Democrats’ leadership team.
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Redistricting is the fight of the year as we’re getting involved in the 2026 election season; primary elections are already being held across the fruited plain, and the battle lines are being drawn for November. By and large, the redistricting efforts have favored Republicans, but there are some truly baffling exceptions.
One of those is South Carolina, where the state Senate refused to pass a redistricting bill; several Republicans joined Democrats in opposing the measure.
The Republican-led South Carolina Senate on Tuesday voted against a measure to advance a new congressional map, ending the redistricting effort in the state for now.
The failed vote was a surprise rejection of President Donald Trump, who had urged lawmakers to pass a redrawn map that eliminated the state’s single majority-Black district, represented by longtime Democratic Rep. James Clyburn.
The South Carolina House approved the map last week in hopes of putting it into place for this year’s midterm elections. As part of the effort, lawmakers also sought to set another primary election for the affected districts in August. But after early voting began on Tuesday for the previously scheduled June primary, some Republicans changed their tune, arguing it was too late to enact new district lines.
“Neither my conscience nor my common sense will allow me to stop an election that is already underway,” said Republican state Sen. Richard Cash, a Republican who changed his vote due to timing.
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Alabama Republicans immediately called for an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court after losing a redistricting battle at a three-judge panel of a federal court.
Republicans are trying to reinstate a 2023 congressional map that would allow them the possibility of picking up a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Democrats claimed the new map would send Alabama back to the ‘1950s and 60s.’
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The explosive standoff over the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act has pushed the U.S. Senate into a pressure cooker, transforming the legislative battle into a high-stakes referendum on the leadership of Majority Leader John Thune. For a rapidly growing number of Americans, the slow, agonizing movement on this landmark election security bill is nothing short of a tactical surrender – a profound failure of nerve from a leader increasingly viewed as a worthless roadblock to the populist agenda.
Across the country, the hatred directed at Thune is reaching a boiling point, fueled by the conviction that his deliberate inaction is a direct betrayal of the citizens he was chosen to lead. Indeed, there is no institutional excuse; his handling of the SAVE Act is a definitive reason why he should resign.
To understand the intense fury surrounding John Thune’s leadership, one must first look at the bill at the center of the storm. The SAVE Act represents a massive proposed shift in how American federal elections are conducted. The bill’s core mandate is simple but sweeping: it would require all Americans to present formal documentary proof of citizenship – such as a U.S. passport or a certified birth certificate alongside photo identification – in order to register to vote in federal elections.
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Lawmakers in the South Carolina House of Representatives have just passed a new U.S. congressional map that could eliminate the district of a powerful congressman with the only Democrat seat in the state.
The move is setting up a major political battle ahead of the 2026 midterms.
The Republican-led chamber approved the measure by a 74–37 vote after lengthy debate, sending the proposal to the GOP-controlled state Senate for further consideration.
Federal Judge Shuts Down TN Dems Over New Congressional Map– townhall.com
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Tennessee drew its new congressional map, with state Democrats filing a challenge to block its implementation. That’s likely to be the usual move as Republicans push to redraw their maps across the South following the Callais decision. The map debate caused a commotion at the state Capitol. Tennessee Democrats tried to block the map, and a federal judge put the kibosh on it (via Channel 5 Nashville):
🚨 A federal judge has declined to immediately block Tennessee’s new Republican-drawn congressional map. pic.twitter.com/ecjPsszfPC
— SCOTUS Wire (@scotus_wire) May 14, 2026
🚨 NOW: A federal judge has just REFUSED to block Tennessee’s new 2026 redistricting map, which eliminates the last remaining Democrat seat and makes the state 9R-0D
ANOTHER WIN!
Democrats are melting down after EVERY court loss, their era of racial cheating has ended 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/I8Z2JmgDN5
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) May 14, 2026
A federal judge denied a request Thursday to temporarily block Tennessee’s newly approved congressional map from taking effect ahead of the 2026 elections.
Chief U.S. District Judge William L. Campbell Jr. denied plaintiffs’ request for a temporary restraining order and canceled a hearing that had been scheduled for May 20, according to a court order filed Thursday.
The ruling stems from a lawsuit filed last week by the Tennessee Democratic Party and several plaintiffs challenging the state’s newly redrawn congressional districts approved during a special legislative session. The lawsuit argues the map unlawfully dismantles a majority-Black district and creates election confusion ahead of the August primary.
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Unsurprisingly, Democrats are willing to eliminate black-majority congressional districts through redistricting in order to gain more political power, a new poll finds. Democrat politicians and pundits have long claimed that any proposed shift away from race-based gerrymandering is racist, repeatedly weaponizing the issue to smear Republicans.
The Politico poll, conducted in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision on the Voting Rights Act, shows “a lot of Democrats are willing to sacrifice Black voting power to beat the GOP.” At face value, respondents — who were Kamala Harris voters — said discriminatory gerrymandering to carve out special districts for black voters and other minorities is more important “even if it means Democrats draw fewer seats.”
After the Virginia Supreme Court threw out a new congressional district map that eliminated four GOP seats, progressives want to purge the court and replace it with more loyal progressives. The plan is to lower the mandatory retirement age of judges to below the youngest member of the VA Supreme Court so they can put progressive activists in to take their place.
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A protest sign outside Alabama’s statehouse on May 7.Kim Chandler/AP
In a stunning act of political partisanship, the Roberts Court on Monday night discarded its own precedents to green-light a last-ditch effort by Alabama to use a gerrymandered congressional map for the 2026 midterms. The move, which comes less than two weeks after the court destroyed the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, will reduce Black representation.
Monday’s 6-3 order, divided along partisan lines, shows how Republican-controlled states can use the high court’s April 29 Callais decision as carte-blanche to shut Black representatives out of Congress. In Alabama’s case, precedent, court doctrine, and a damning lower-court ruling stood in the way of the state throwing out its current map containing two majority-Black congressional districts represented by Democrats. Monday night’s decision of the Republican-appointed justices to toss all that aside shows how the court has not only unleashed a new wave of racial and partisan gerrymandering, but is sweeping away any obstacles so that Republicans nab as many seats as possible this November—enough to potentially prevent Democrats from retaking the House.
“There’s something bizarre going on with the court making choices that seem to very heavily benefit one party.”
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A key Illinois election law unlawfully requires the prioritization of race in drawing legislative districts, a new lawsuit alleges. The suit was brought in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Louisiana v. Callais decision stripping states’ ability to use race in the redistricting process.
“States may not use race to allocate power,” said Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) President and General Counsel J. Christian Adams, whose group spearheaded the legal challenge.
Announced on Monday, the lawsuit brought by PILF on behalf of Illinois resident Jeanne Ives contests that the state “has districting criteria that violates the United States Constitution explicitly by elevating race as a primary purpose in legislative line drawing.” Ives more specifically takes to task the Illinois Voting Rights Act (ILVRA), which she argues “mandates the creation of racial districts in violation of [her] civil rights protected by the Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution and Section 2(a) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (‘Voting Rights Act’).”
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South Carolina should be a state where redistricting is simple, like in Florida. The Louisiana vs. Callais decision limited the application of section II of the Voting Rights Act, which permits congressional apportionment based on race, to the point of erasure. The whole South can now be redrawn. Florida accomplished it in two days. Tennessee has followed suit, and last night, the Supreme Court gave Alabama the green light. So, what’s delaying the process in the Palmetto State? Three words: South Carolina Republicans.
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South Carolina is the latest state that has moved to cancel their primary election, even though people are already voting:
South Carolina Republicans took the first step Friday to cancel the state’s June primary election — to give more time to potentially pass a new gerrymandered congressional map — as absentee voting is already underway.
A South Carolina House subcommittee voted 3-2 along party lines to advance a bill that would move the state’s June 9 primary election to August 11, with the expectation that the legislature would redraw the state’s congressional map to dismantle its lone Democratic district, represented by longtime Rep. Jim Clyburn.
The vote came after the committee heard hours of public testimony urging lawmakers to reject pressure to delay the state’s primaries and draw new congressional maps. In all, 23 South Carolina residents testified against redistricting and moving the state’s primaries. No one spoke in support of either measure.
More than 6,000 absentee ballots have already been sent out to military and overseas voters for the June primary — more than 200 of those ballots have since been returned, according to the South Carolina Election Commission (SCEC). Should the legislature approve the measure to delay the state’s primary, those ballots will be disqualified.
The woman behind the Virginia special election to effectively eliminate 4 GOP U.S. House seats is now under FBI investigation. Virginia’s State Senator L. Louise Lucas saw her offices raided, along with other businesses connected to her.
So far, only anonymous sources are cited as claiming this is connected to a corruption investigation directly linked to her. She is considered the main driver of the Virginia gerrymander election plan that is currently under legal scrutiny.
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Just days after a recent Supreme Court ruling against unconstitutional race-based gerrymandering, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced that it will enforce the decision nationwide.
Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon told Just the News, “This is the law of the land now, and eventually every jurisdiction in the United States is going to have to comply with race-free line-drawing.”
Last week, Supreme Court justices ruled 6–3 in Louisiana v. Callais that the state’s newly redrawn congressional map relied “too heavily on race” in creating a second majority-black district in the state.
That decision is expected to affect states with maps drawn to heavily favor Democrats, including California, New York, Colorado, Illinois, Connecticut, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, and Virginia.
Many of these states have enacted their own Voting Rights Acts, which explicitly use race as a predominant factor in determining districts.
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“We gonna have to resist with every fiber in our body. We gonna have to take this system on at every election.”
Democratic Mississippi Representative Bennie Thompson compared the ongoing redistricting efforts in Southern states to a “second Civil War” as his state considers congressional map changes that could potentially eliminate his district. This follows the Supreme Court’s ruling that creating congressional districts based on the racial composition of its resident is unconstitutional.
“This is equivalent to a second Civil War,” Thompson said during an appearance on Al Sharpton’s MS NOW “PoliticsNation.”
“We’re gonna have to get our act together,” he added. “We gonna have to resist with every fiber in our body. We gonna have to take this system on at every election.”
Thompson later shared a clip of his remarks on social media, writing, “I don’t care what they say; we are committed to fighting this redistricting no matter what. There are more at stake than meets the eye, and we’ve come too far to ever turn around!”
