Steve Marshall is stealing Shomari Figures’s seat. Alabama’s attorney general signed the theft Wednesday — an emergency filing asking the Supreme Court to nullify the election Figures won and replace the court-ordered map that elected him with a Republican-drawn map three federal judges found intentionally discriminates against Black voters. Marshall lied to the justices. He told them Alabama did not intentionally discriminate. Three federal judges found undisputed evidence of intentional racial discrimination. They reviewed Alabama’s evidence in 2023, found the discrimination, blocked the map, ordered Alabama to use a court-drawn remedy that complies with the Voting Rights Act. Alabama used that map in 2024. Shomari Figures won Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District. Donald Trump’s Justice Department is backing Marshall’s lie. The appeal demands the Court rule by Monday. The theft is in progress.
Steve Marshall lied to the Supreme Court
Marshall told the Court Alabama did not intentionally discriminate. Three federal judges found undisputed evidence he is lying. The panel’s phrase: “undisputed evidence” of intentional racial discrimination. Marshall is asking the Supreme Court to ignore that evidence and authorize Alabama to use the map the panel found violates the Voting Rights Act. Marshall is Alabama’s chief law-enforcement officer. He directs the legal team. He signs the briefs. He made the decision to file Wednesday’s emergency appeal. He put his name on the lie. He is accountable.
The Trump administration joined the theft. The Justice Department filed a brief backing Marshall’s lie. The brief says Alabama is “highly likely to succeed” and calls the court-ordered map that elected Shomari Figures a “racial gerrymander.” Reality-inversion technique: the Trump Justice Department is calling a map drawn to remedy intentional discrimination against Black voters a racial gerrymander. A racial gerrymander is a map drawn to sort voters by race without a compelling governmental interest. Compliance with the Voting Rights Act is a compelling governmental interest. The three-judge panel ordered Alabama to comply after finding Alabama’s map violated the Act. The Trump DOJ is calling that compliance discrimination. War is peace. Compliance is discrimination. Theft is redistricting. The Justice Department officials Trump appointed wrote that brief. They made the decision to back Marshall’s lie. They are calling a federal court’s Voting Rights Act remedy a racial gerrymander. They are accountable.
Alabama’s Republican-controlled legislature drew the map Marshall is defending. Someone introduced the bill. Someone chaired the committee. Someone brought it to the floor. Someone voted yes. The three-judge panel found their map intentionally discriminates against Black voters. The legislators who drew it, voted for it, and signed it into law authored the discrimination the panel documented. They have names. They drew the theft. They are accountable.
The Supreme Court justices who will decide Marshall’s appeal have names. John Roberts wrote Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, gutting Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Samuel Alito wrote Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee in 2021, weakening Section 2. Clarence Thomas has written he believes the entire Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional. The conservative majority weakened Section 2 last month in a Louisiana case. Alabama moved immediately to exploit the opening. The legal architecture that permits Marshall to file what he filed was built by Roberts, Alito, Thomas, and the justices who joined their opinions. They opened the door. Marshall is walking through it this week.
Who benefits, who pays
Alabama’s Republican Party benefits. The Republican candidates who will run in the stolen district benefit. Marshall said in his filing the map Alabama wants would favor Republicans 6-1. The map the court ordered elected Figures, a Democrat. The map Alabama wants would erase Figures’s district and return Alabama’s congressional delegation to 6-1 Republican control. The Republican House majority Trump needs to hold power benefits. The donors, consultants, and party infrastructure whose income depends on Republican control benefit.
The Trump administration benefits from signaling it will not enforce the Voting Rights Act against Republican states diluting Black voting power. The Justice Department’s brief tells Republican state officials across the South the federal government will back them when they draw maps that violate the Act. That signal is worth more than the seat itself. The Federalist Society lawyers who built the Supreme Court majority that gutted the Voting Rights Act benefit. Leonard Leo’s operation built the Court. The Court built the architecture. Marshall is using the architecture to steal Figures’s seat.
Who pays? The Black voters in Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District whose voting power Marshall is diluting. Shomari Figures, whose seat Marshall is stealing. Every Black voter in Alabama who cast a ballot in 2024 believing the court-ordered map would remain in place. The voters did not lose an election. Marshall is asking the Supreme Court to nullify the election Figures won by reinstating a map federal judges found intentionally discriminates.
The cost is paid in civic trust. The belief that showing up to vote on the date the state specifies will result in your vote counting and your elected representative being seated. The belief that when federal judges find intentional discrimination and order a remedy, the state will comply rather than appeal to a Supreme Court it believes will overrule the judges. Marshall is teaching Alabama’s Black voters the apparatus will not honor court-ordered maps, will not honor the elections Black candidates win, will continue redrawing and relitigating until the desired result is achieved. That lesson is being delivered to every Black voter watching this case, not just in Alabama but across the South where Republican legislatures are doing what Alabama is doing.
The mechanism is documented
The timeline is clear. The three-judge panel ruled in 2023 that Alabama’s Republican-drawn map intentionally diluted Black voting power and violated the Voting Rights Act. Alabama is 27 percent Black. The Act requires states to draw maps giving Black voters the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice where the Black population is sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority. The panel found Alabama should have two districts where Black voters form a majority or close to it. The panel ordered Alabama to use a court-drawn map creating those two districts. Alabama used that map in 2024. Figures won the newly created second district.
After the Supreme Court’s Louisiana ruling last month weakened Section 2, Marshall moved to reinstate Alabama’s 2023 map. The Supreme Court lifted the injunction blocking the map and sent the case back to the three-judge panel to reconsider in light of Louisiana. The panel reconsidered. The panel stood by its finding: undisputed evidence of intentional racial discrimination. The panel said the Louisiana ruling did not affect its factual finding of intentional discrimination. The panel ordered Alabama to continue using the court-ordered map. Marshall filed the emergency appeal Wednesday asking the Supreme Court to overrule the panel.
Marshall’s filing argues lawmakers, not judges, should set electoral boundaries. That principle is correct when lawmakers comply with federal law and irrelevant when they do not. Lawmakers set boundaries when the boundaries they set do not intentionally discriminate against Black voters in violation of the Voting Rights Act. When lawmakers draw maps that intentionally discriminate, federal courts intervene. That happened here. The three-judge panel found Alabama’s lawmakers drew a map that intentionally discriminates. The panel ordered a remedy. Marshall is asking the Supreme Court to let the discriminatory map stand anyway on the theory that lawmakers’ choices should be respected even when those choices violate federal law. That is bad faith.
The Trump DOJ’s inversion is bad faith. The DOJ called the court-ordered compliance-map a “racial gerrymander” in a brief designed to carry negative moral weight into the justices’ deliberations. The three-judge panel ordered Alabama to use a map that complies with the Voting Rights Act after finding Alabama’s original map violated the Act through intentional discrimination. The Trump DOJ is calling that compliance-map discrimination. The operation is deliberate. The term “racial gerrymander” means a map drawn to sort voters by race without a compelling governmental interest. Compliance with a federal civil-rights statute after a federal court finds intentional discrimination is a compelling governmental interest. The Trump DOJ knows this. The DOJ is inverting the frame anyway. Theft becomes redistricting. Compliance becomes discrimination. The three-judge panel’s remedy becomes the violation.
The theft is theft
Marshall lied to the Supreme Court. He told the justices Alabama did not intentionally discriminate. The three-judge panel found undisputed evidence of intentional racial discrimination. Marshall is asking the Supreme Court to overrule a factual finding made by judges who heard the case, reviewed the evidence, issued a ruling, reconsidered that ruling in light of the Louisiana precedent, and stood by the finding. The Supreme Court reviews legal questions. The Court does not ordinarily retry factual findings. The panel’s finding that Alabama intentionally discriminated is a factual finding the panel said was independent of the Louisiana legal ruling. Marshall is asking the Court to overrule the factual finding to permit use of a map that violates federal law. He is asking the Court to authorize the theft three federal judges documented and blocked.
The Court may do it. The conservative majority has spent a decade dismantling the Voting Rights Act. Shelby County gutted Section 5. Brnovich weakened Section 2. Last month’s Louisiana ruling weakened Section 2 further. Roberts, Alito, Thomas have made clear through their opinions they believe the Voting Rights Act as historically enforced goes too far. Marshall’s appeal tests how far the Court will go. Will the Court overrule a three-judge panel’s factual finding of intentional discrimination to let Alabama use a map the panel found violates federal law? The answer will tell us whether Section 2 has any enforcement mechanism remaining or whether the Court has reduced it to nullity.
The voters whose districts Marshall is redrawing are not waiting for the Court to decide. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund has filed opposing briefs. The ACLU has filed opposing briefs. Shomari Figures is organizing in his district. The voters who elected him are watching. The August 11 special primaries are the deadline Marshall is pressing. The Court will decide before Monday whether to grant Marshall’s emergency appeal. The three-judge panel held the line. The panel found intentional discrimination and refused to lift the injunction blocking Alabama’s map. Marshall is asking the Court to erase that line. The theft is theft. The perpetrators are named. The cost-bearers are documented.
You push the arc
You name what is happening. Steve Marshall is stealing Shomari Figures’s congressional seat. Marshall lied to the Supreme Court to authorize the theft. The Trump Justice Department backed Marshall’s lie. The beneficiaries are the Republican Party, the candidates who will win under the stolen map, the House majority Trump needs, the Federalist Society apparatus that built the Court permitting this appeal. The cost-bearers are the Black voters whose power Marshall is diluting and Shomari Figures whose seat Marshall is stealing. The institutional authors are Steve Marshall, the Trump Justice Department officials who filed the brief calling a compliance-map a racial gerrymander, the Alabama legislators who drew the discriminatory map, and the Supreme Court justices who built the legal architecture that opened this door.
You call the Supreme Court at 202-479-3000. You tell them the theft is theft. You fund the NAACP Legal Defense Fund at naacpldf.org and the ACLU at aclu.org whose court filings are the institutional check remaining. You register voters in Alabama’s redrawn districts through the Alabama Democratic Party and Fair Fight Action. You organize turnout in the affected districts in numbers large enough to win the redrawn maps anyway. You refuse to let the theft be normalized as redistricting. The theft is theft.
The three-judge panel refused to let Alabama proceed with a map the panel found intentionally discriminates. That refusal is the line holding. Marshall is asking the Supreme Court to erase the line. The Court will decide before Monday whether the line holds or whether Alabama proceeds with the theft. The voters are organizing. The lawyers are filing. The arc bends toward justice when the cost of the theft exceeds the benefit the theft delivers. You raise the cost. You organize the voters Marshall is trying to erase. You fund the lawyers fighting the case. You call the Court and name what Marshall is doing. You push the arc.