By Tierney Sneed, CNN

(CNN) — A federal court ruled Thursday that Alabama engaged in intentional discrimination when it refused to draw a congressional plan with a second Black majority district after courts, including the Supreme Court, repeatedly rejected maps with just one such district.

With the finding, the court said it would consider whether to put Alabama under a Voting Rights Act provision that would require it to get federal approval of its congressional plans going forward.

The three-judge panel – made up of a former President Bill Clinton-appointee and two appointees of President Donald Trump – said that its conclusion that Alabama was acting with a discriminatory intent was “unusual” but not a “particularly close call.”

“This record thus leaves us in no doubt that the purpose of the design of the 2023 Plan was to crack Black voters across congressional districts in a manner that makes it impossible to create two districts in which they have an opportunity to elect candidates of their choice, and thereby intentionally perpetuate the discriminatory effects of the 2021 Plan,” the court said.

The legal war over Alabama’s congressional map has waged for nearly half a decade. The 2020 redistricting cycle was the first since the passage of the Voting Rights Act that Alabama and other states in the South were not required to get so-called “preclearance” for the maps. A 2013 Supreme Court ruling that gutted the part of the law that required states with a history of racial discrimination in their voting practices to get changes to their election policies approved by the Justice Department or a federal court.

The preclearance provision in play now in the case is a separate one, known as Section 3. Under it, states and jurisdictions can be forced to get federal approval for election policies because they’ve intentionally discriminated against voters of color.

The congressional plan Alabama drew after the 2020 census made six out of the seven districts majority White, even though 27% of the state’s population is Black. The Supreme Court allowed the plan to be used in the 2022 election, but then affirmed the findings by lower courts that the map had the effect of unlawfully diluting Black votes.

Yet the legislature, given the opportunity to redraw the map, refused to enact a plan that included a second congressional district that would allow Black voters to elect the candidate choice, sticking instead to a map that had only one majority-Black district.

A court-appointed expert drew a temporary map for the 2024 election, and, for the first time in 150 years, Alabama elected two Black people to its congressional delegation that year.

Thursday’s court ruling nodded to arguments that the Voting Rights Act was no longer necessary. But, the court said, “It seems painfully obvious to us that the State’s decision to purposefully dilute the votes of Black Alabamians, particularly after exhausting its appellate rights for a preliminary injunction entered under Section Two, flies in the face of its position that Section Two has outlived the purpose Congress intended.”

“Likewise, we do not diminish the substantial improvements Alabama has made in its official treatment of Black Alabamians in recent decades,” the court said. “Yet we cannot reconcile the State’s intentional decision to discriminate in drawing its congressional districts with its position that Alabama has finally closed out its repugnant history of official discrimination involving voting rights.”

The office of Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall did not respond to CNN’s inquiry about the ruling.

In a statement, the challengers to the map called the ruling a “testament to the dedication and persistence of many generations of Black Alabamians who pursued political equality at great cost. We stand on the shoulders of our predecessors.”

“We know that all Alabamians will benefit from today’s victory just as we have benefited from the work of others. We hope our win will benefit Black voters in the rest of the country as well,” their statement said.

CNN’s Ethan Cohen contributed to this report.

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