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Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed legislation Friday that would set up new primary elections if the courts allow Republicans to change their congressional and state Senate maps ahead of the November midterms.
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Alabama’s primaries are set to take place under its current maps on May 19. But the legislation the Republican-controlled Legislature approved Friday gives Ivey the ability to schedule separate special primary elections for affected districts if redrawn maps are put into place.
“Alabama knows our state, our people and our districts best,” Ive said in a statement.
Following a seismic U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Louisiana’s map that limited the use of race in redistricting, Alabama Republicans asked a federal court to allow them to replace their current court-ordered congressional map, which contains two majority-minority districts represented by Democrats, with a map lawmakers approved in 2023 that has one. They filed a similar request with the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday.
In 2023, a federal court ordered Alabama to adopt a map with one majority-Black seat in the 7th Congressional District and one Black “opportunity” seat in the 2nd Congressional District, where a plurality of the voting-age population is Black. Overall, roughly one quarter of Alabama’s population is Black.
Friday’s move in Alabama is the latest in a frenzied push by southern states to use the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling to enact more favorable maps for Republicans ahead of this fall’s elections, where control of the House is up for grabs.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee on Thursday signed a new congressional map into law that carves up the state’s lone majority-Black and Democratic-held House district. In Louisiana, Republicans delayed their May 16 House primaries to draw new district lines after their map was struck down. South Carolina Republican lawmakers are also weighing whether to take up a new map.
Calling the state’s current map a “racially gerrymandered disgrace,” Alabama Republican House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter celebrated the legislation Friday.
“This guarantees that the Second Congressional District — which was wrongfully handed to democrats on a silver platter by the courts — is flipped back to republican control while also putting the Seventh Congressional District in play,” he said in a statement. “As much as we would have preferred to draw a new map like our neighbors in Tennessee, the legal constraints created by Allen v. Milligan make that impossible today.”
The two Democratic-held seats in Alabama are currently represented by Black members of Congress, Reps. Terri Sewelll and Shomari Figures.
“Today we are not debating maps, we are debating democracy itself,” said state Sen. Vivan Davis Figures, Shomari Figures. “We’re debating whether power matters more than principle.”
Jane C. Timm is a senior reporter for NBC News.
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