Justice Samuel Alito used a concurring opinion Monday to publicly rebuke Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s lone dissent in the Louisiana redistricting case, calling her arguments “baseless and insulting” and “groundless and utterly irresponsible.”
Alito was joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas in the written rebuke, filed after the Supreme Court voted to fast-track implementation of its redistricting ruling ahead of the 2026 midterms.
“The dissent goes on to claim that our decision is an unprincipled use of power,” Alito wrote. “That is a groundless and utterly irresponsible charge.”
The unsigned order allows Louisiana to move immediately forward with redrawing its congressional map, following the court’s 6-3 ruling last month that found the state’s existing map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and significantly narrowed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Jackson filed a solo dissent, warning the court risked creating the “appearance of partiality” by intervening before the standard 32-day waiting period had elapsed. Neither of her two liberal colleagues, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, joined the dissent.
Alito responded directly to Jackson’s procedural objection, calling her reliance on the 32-day rule “trivial at best.” He said the rule exists primarily to allow time for rehearing petitions, and no party in this case had requested reconsideration.
“The dissent accuses the Court of ‘unshackl[ing]’ itself from ‘constraints,'” Alito wrote. “It is the dissent’s rhetoric that lacks restraint.”
The fast-track order throws Louisiana’s election calendar into immediate flux. Ballots have already been sent to some voters and the state’s primary has been paused pending the map changes. State officials now face a compressed timeline to add new congressional districts before the 2026 election cycle proceeds.
The Louisiana case centers on a map the court ruled last month illegally divided Black voters across districts to dilute their electoral influence. The ruling reshaped how courts interpret Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, limiting the circumstances under which states can be found to have racially gerrymandered congressional maps.
