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A federal court in Alabama on Tuesday ruled, yet again, that the state had illegally discriminated against Black voters in drawing its congressional map. The decision, issued by a three-judge district court that included two Donald Trump appointees, comes after the Supreme Court had sprinted to side with Alabama Republicans two weeks ago in light of its debilitation of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais. This right-leaning lower court’s thundering, exasperated decision shows just how obvious Alabama’s Jim Crow–style discrimination has been over the past few years. And it will force SCOTUS to either draw the line at overtly racist gerrymandering or admit that it has declared open season on Black Americans’ political representation.

Alabama has one of the largest Black populations of any state. And the VRA requires that racial minorities be given an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. But after the 2020 census, the Alabama Legislature has been on a tear trying to silence Black voices by breaking up compact minority-heavy districts around cities and spreading those populations across white rural areas. And the state’s voters have been in court trying to fight for equal representation ever since. These cases have gone before a three-judge district court made up of Judges Anna Manasco and Terry Moorer, both Trump appointees, along with Judge Stanley Marcus, an appointee first of Ronald Reagan, then Bill Clinton. In other words, these are not the types of judges you would expect to look for reasons to distinguish or defy Supreme Court orders. Instead, it is only Alabama’s blatantly racist illegal actions that compelled the panel to reach its repeated rulings that the state is engaged in race-based discrimination.

These judges first found that the Legislature had violated Section 2 of the VRA by diluting Black representation in 2022, after which Alabama went to the Supreme Court and lost in Allen v. Milligan. In a 2023 opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, he explained that the map the state had created was an illegal scheme specifically designed to eliminate Alabama’s second majority-minority district. The state then tried to ignore the high court’s ruling: Having been told by........

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