Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson took aim at her colleagues Monday with a blistering rebuke of what she labeled as their “unusual” move, one that she claimed had been done no more than three times in the last quarter century, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
Jackson was referring to the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in late April when it voted to effectively gut a provision of the Voting Rights Act designed to prohibit racially discriminatory voting policies. The court was deciding on a matter related to Louisiana's congressional district map, with Republicans having challenged a lower court’s order requiring state lawmakers to create a second majority-Black district.
In taking up the case, the conservative-leaning Supreme Court forwent the “typical 32-day waiting period,” the Post reported, and instead, decided to expedite the case, a decision that paved the way for the ongoing GOP gerrymandering blitz seen across the American South, and one that Jackson was the only justice to object to.
“The parties who came to us said please alter your rules so that we can essentially have an advantage,” Jackson told a group of lawyers in Washington, D.C. on Monday, the Post reported. “That should not be something that we should do because it would look like we were doing something unusual.”
Jackson went on to further condemn the Supreme Court’s decision to expedite the case, warning that it risked harming the court’s reputation going forward given that “speeding up the release of its ruling made it appear as if it were favoring one side,” the Post reported. However, she ultimately “stopped short of accusing her fellow justices of being motivated by political considerations.”
Jackson also criticized the decision to expedite the case in her lone dissenting opinion.
“To avoid the appearance of partiality here, we could, as per usual, opt to stay on the sidelines and take no position by applying our default procedures,” Jackson wrote in her dissent. “But, today, the Court chooses the opposite.”