When Court Victories Fail: How Alabama Defies Federal Voting Rights Rulings

Earlier this summer, the Supreme Court's Louisiana v. Callais decision reduced Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to what Justice Kagan's dissent described, with surgical precision, as "all but a dead letter." Five court victories. One gutted statute. A state that treated every federal order like a draft opinion.

The Alabama Playbook for Ignoring Courts

Milligan's column walks through what institutional defiance looks like in practice. In February 2022, a federal panel — two Trump appointees and one Reagan appointee — unanimously found that Alabama had violated federal law by drawing a congressional map that diluted Black voting strength. The state appealed. It lost at the Supreme Court in June 2023. Instead of redrawing the map as ordered, the Alabama legislature convened in special session and passed a new map that diluted Black voting power more than the version the justices had just struck down. The governor signed it. When the federal panel summoned Solicitor General Edmund LaCour to explain, he told the bench, on the record, that his office was confident the Court would revise its reasoning if given another opportunity. That is the model: lose, ignore, re-argue, wait for the bench to drift further right, and repeat. Louisiana v. Callais was the payout.

What Section 2 Actually Has Left

Section 2 was already the skeleton of the Voting Rights Act. In 2013, the Supreme Court dismantled preclearance — the mechanism that blocked discriminatory maps before they took effect — leaving ordinary citizens to litigate after the fact. Callais has now narrowed that litigation path to what Milligan describes as "a needle's eye." Redistricting fights still exist on paper, but the structural pressure that once forced states into compliance has been transferred. It now sits with state legislatures, not with the federal bench. The leverage has moved.

The Ground Game That Has to Pick Up the Slack

When courts stop enforcing a right, the work of protecting it moves to organizers. Four Directions Native Vote — Indian Country has announced a series of Democracy Academy events ahead of the 2026 midterms: a Minneapolis session on September 20 followed by a two-day forum September 21-22, then Las Vegas on October 11 with a forum October 12-13. The organization frames its work as nonpartisan voter education and election protection, but the material reality is that tribal communities have always had to build their own electoral infrastructure because the legal one has never reliably served them. Watch those events. They are the practical counterweight to a Supreme Court that has decided voting rights cases are beneath its attention.