The Supreme Court’s decision to effectively gut the Voting Rights Act has set off a scramble of Republican-led Southern states rushing to redraw their congressional maps before this year’s midterm elections. After a subsequent Supreme Court decision helped speed along this process of eliminating majority-Black districts, the court’s only Black woman has issued a scathing dissent criticizing her colleagues.
Jackson criticizes court for violating principles to speed up redistricting process
As Blavity previously reported, after the conservative majority of the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais that allows the state to eliminate its second majority-Black congressional district, Louisiana and other Republican-controlled states began immediately working to redraw their district lines. The court has issued a follow-up order that speeds up the implementation of its ruling by skipping the usual 32-day wait time before a Supreme Court decision is certified and sent back to a lower court for implementation. This fast-tracking led Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who dissented on the original case, to issue a scathing rebuke of her colleagues.
In her latest dissent, Jackson said, “The Court’s decision in these cases has spawned chaos in the State of Louisiana.” Jackson noted that mail-in ballots in Louisiana had been distributed and some had already been completed and mailed back by the time the court made its decision. By speeding up the implementation process of its ruling, Jackson argued that the court is going beyond the requirements of the ruling to influence a political outcome. Their decision to waive the usual 32-day certification period “is tantamount to an approval of Louisiana’s rush to pause the ongoing election in order to pass a new map.” Jackson called out the Supreme Court for violating two of its principles by inserting itself into a partisan redistricting process and by not following its own “Purcell principle,” by which the courts are generally hesitant to implement last-minute rule changes for elections. “The Court unshackles itself from both constraints today and dives into the fray,” Jackson wrote. “And just like that, those principles give way to power.”
Supreme Court divided amid heated midterm election year
Jackson’s unusually biting dissent comes as tensions between the court’s conservative majority and its liberal minority spill over into public criticism. As The Grio noted, Jackson’s dissent comes weeks after an address she delivered at Yale Law School in which she called out her Supreme Court colleagues for an unusual pattern of siding with President Donald Trump by allowing him to carry out disputed and possibly illegal actions while these executive actions are being litigated. And in April, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh for not understanding the impact of immigration stops on working-class people who may not be able to afford delays getting to work. Kavanaugh “probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour,” Sotomayor said in her remarks at the University of Kansas School of Law. She later apologized, calling her comments “inappropriate” and “hurtful.”
The Louisiana case, meanwhile, is already having a significant impact on voters in that state and beyond. More than 42,000 people had already returned mail-in ballots in Louisiana when Gov. Jeff Landry suspended that state’s House primaries the day after the Supreme Court’s ruling. Those House votes will now be disregarded and the House primaries delayed until July 15 or another day as chosen by the state’s legislature. In addition to Louisiana, at least four other states — Alabama, Florida, South Carolina and Tennessee — have all implemented their own processes to redraw district lines, which could decrease or even eliminate the majority-Black districts in their states. These moves are in addition to a partisan wave of political gerrymandering kicked off when Trump pressured states such as Texas to redraw district lines, a process that has often targeted majority-Black districts in Republican-led states.
With a high-stakes midterm election season already in progress, the Supreme Court’s ruling for Louisiana and its decision to fast-track implementation have accelerated a process that threatens Black representation and voting power throughout the South. In the midst of these unusual and destructive rulings, the sole Black woman justice is publicly rebuking her conservative colleagues for violating the court’s usual standards for seemingly political purposes.