The Supreme Court cleared the way Monday for Louisiana to redraw its congressional map and dismantle a majority-Black district — and in doing so exposed a rare and bitter public feud between conservative Justice Samuel Alito and liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The court's brief order, issued 6-3 along ideological lines, resolved a technical procedural question about when last week's blockbuster ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act takes effect in Louisiana. Raw, personal language in the justices' writings drew the most attention, according to CNN.
Jackson, the lone dissenter, accused the majority of taking steps "to influence its implementation" of the ruling and suggested the court should have stayed out of it to avoid the appearance of partiality.
“Not content to have decided the law,” Jackson wrote of the majority, “it now takes steps to influence its implementation.” The high court’s decision to “buck our usual practice,” she added, was "tantamount to an approval of Louisiana’s rush to pause the ongoing election in order to pass a new map.”
Alito fired back, calling Jackson's points in her dissent "trivial at best," and "baseless and insulting."
“The dissent goes on to claim that our decision represents an unprincipled use of power,” Alito wrote in a concurrence joined by conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. “That is a groundless and utterly irresponsible charge.”
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, has already suspended the state's May 16 congressional primaries to give lawmakers time to draw a new map — a move that has thrown Louisiana voters into confusion with ballots already distributed and early voting underway. That new map will almost certainly result in one fewer Black and Democratic member of Congress from Louisiana.
The decision is already reverberating across the South. Republican officials in Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina and Alabama are facing growing pressure to launch their own redistricting efforts in the wake of last week's ruling.