How dare you point out that Sam Alito is a partisan hack!
A hit dog will holler.
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Once again, the Supreme Court’s conservatives put their thumbs on the scale for Republicans. And once again, they’re very mad that people noticed.
Not content to undo civil rights and destroy the Court’s credibility, they’re racing to ensure that Republicans can redraw House districts even as voting is already underway. And if anyone points out their flagrant partisanship and clanging hypocrisy, they scream bloody murder, even — especially! — if the person pointing the finger is one of their fellow justices.
Undoing the VRA
Last Wednesday, the Supreme Court effectively killed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The 6-3 opinion in Louisiana v. Callais was the culmination of a decades-long conservative project to dilute the voting power of Black Americans, and it set off a mad scramble in red states to erase majority-Black districts before the November election.
The original VRA had two central pillars. Section 5 required states with a history of racial discrimination to get federal approval before changing their voting laws. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the preclearance requirement in Shelby County v. Holder. With confident condescension, Chief Justice Roberts assured us that those Jim Crow-era safeguards were no longer necessary, since America had basically solved racism. And anyway, Roberts assured us that Section 2, which allowed minority voters to challenge electoral maps that diluted their voting power, was “permanent” and “applies nationwide.” The very reason we didn’t need Section 5 anymore, he said, was because Section 2 had been so successful at vindicating the rights of minority voters.
In fact, Section 5 of the VRA was critical to protecting ballot access, and the Court’s decision in Shelby County unleashed an immediate wave of voter suppression laws designed to depress minority voting. But Section 2 did guarantee at least some Black representation, thanks to a Supreme Court case called Thornburg v. Gingles. In 1986, the Court held that electoral maps designed to ensure that Black voters could never elect the candidate of their choice violated Section 2, and that plaintiffs didn’t have to prove discriminatory intent — just discriminatory effect.
Districts in which minority voters could elect representatives responsive to the needs of their communities became known as Gingles districts. And since minorities vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, the districts served as a major impediment to Republican gerrymandering in states with large numbers of Black voters. Indeed, Callais involved a challenge to Louisiana’s two majority-Black congressional districts.
Writing for the majority in Callais, Justice Alito purported to strike a blow against discrimination. In his telling, the creation of majority-Black Gingles districts is racist against white people because it stops them from enacting partisan gerrymanders. From here on out, Black voters will have to prove that Republicans intentionally discriminated against them as minorities, not as Democrats. This effectively zeroes out the language of the VRA that says the relevant metric is the effect of the legislation, not the subjective intent of the legislators. And because the Callais opinion is rooted in the Constitution’s 15th Amendment, there’s no way for Congress to reinstate the provision by statute.
The immediate effect of Callais was to invalidate Louisiana’s congressional map and eliminate at least one of its two majority-Black districts. Black residents make up a third of Louisiana’s population. Under the new regime, they will have a meaningful chance to elect the candidate of their choice in at most one of six congressional seats. The more likely outcome is that Louisiana’s Republicans will eliminate both seats, ensuring a clean sweep for the GOP.
That was last Wednesday. On Monday, the conservative justices broke the Court’s own rules to ensure that their partisan allies could redraw Black representatives out of Congress immediately.
Undoing their own rules
Under Supreme Court Rule 45.3, the clerk waits 32 days before certifying a judgment and sending it back down to the lower court. That waiting period gives the losing party time to petition for rehearing, although it can be shortened or extended at the discretion of the justices.
But the Louisiana primary was set to take place on May 16, and waiting 32 days for the judgment would make it much more difficult to unwind the state’s electoral maps. And so on Monday the Court’s conservatives announced that they were waiving the 32-day requirement on the theory that, while the “appellants oppose it, they have not expressed any intent to ask this Court to reconsider its judgment.”
The order itself was just one paragraph, but it was accompanied by an exceedingly vituperative concurrence and dissent. Noting that the Court had only diverged from the 32-day default twice in the past 25 years, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson hammered her conservative colleagues for “acting as proxies for their favored political parties.”
“Not content to have decided the law, it now takes steps to influence its implementation,” she fumed. “The Court’s decision to buck our usual practice under Rule 45.3 and issue the judgment forthwith is tantamount to an approval of Louisiana’s rush to pause the ongoing election in order to pass a new map.”
Justice Alito, joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, howled at the “baseless and insulting” suggestion that they acted out of partisan motivation, calling it “a groundless and utterly irresponsible charge.”
“The dissent would require that the 2026 congressional elections in Louisiana be held under a map that has been held to be unconstitutional,” they protested, insisting that following the 32-day default rule would be the real partisan intervention.
This is breathtakingly disingenuous.
The Court’s conservatives routinely scold lower court judges for changing voting rules too close to an election. This violates the Purcell principle, named for a 2006 case in which the Court rebuked the 9th Circuit for blocking Arizona’s voter ID law too close to an election and causing voter “confusion.” For 20 years, the Supreme Court’s conservatives have selectively invoked Purcell to allow elections to proceed using maps that courts have already deemed to be unlawful.
In 2022, after lower courts struck down Alabama’s electoral map for violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and disenfranchising Black voters, the Supreme Court intervened to allow Alabama to use the unconstitutional map anyway in the midterms. In 2023, the Court agreed that the maps were illegal under the VRA — but only after they’d let Alabama Republicans use them to take back the House.
Just five months ago, the Court cited Purcell when it rebuked a federal district court for “improperly inserting itself into an active primary campaign” by blocking Texas’s unconstitutionally racial gerrymander.
But given the chance to insert themselves into an acting primary campaign, they regularly jump in with both feet. And in fact they’re equally happy to stomp into the primary itself.
Undoing Reconstruction
The day after the Court issued its decision in Callais, Gov. Jeff Landry issued an executive order declaring that Louisiana’s House primaries were “hereby suspended.” Notably, he did not purport to suspend any other race currently on the ballot, including a hotly contested Senate primary, a state Supreme Court election, school board races, and five constitutional amendments.
More than 100,000 absentee ballots have already been distributed, many of which have already been returned. Any votes cast in US House races will now be discarded, disenfranchising elderly voters, students, service members, and overseas voters. Under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, states are required to send absentee ballots to UOCAVA voters at least 45 days before an election. Will they now be forced to request new ones?
Voters sued, alleging that the statute cited by Landry to justify suspending the election is for actual emergencies, not advantageous Supreme Court rulings. (Although the Supreme Court is rather like a hurricane these days.) Campaign finance and filing deadlines are have gone out the window. And now the Supreme Court’s conservatives have poured accelerant on the whole mess by expediting their own mandate — something they were apparently so desperate to do that they fudged the truth. As the Callais appellants pointed out in their motion to recall the judgment, they explicitly requested “the opportunity to consider seeking rehearing” a week ago and still intend to do so.
The ensuing chaos was entirely predictable — indeed it was predicted by Judge Jackson in her supposedly offensive dissent. But this entire process has gone according to conservatives’ plan. The Court eliminated the last remnant of a law designed to ensure minority representation and equal access to the franchise. Then it sprinted to remove any obstacle to states weaponizing their electoral maps to get rid of as many Black members of Congress as possible.
Conservative justices excoriated trial courts for sowing “confusion” by enforcing the law months before an election. Now they’ve gleefully ushered in electoral Ragnarok, as multiple states race to get rid of Black districts, even as voting is already underway.
As Justice Jackson put it: “The Court unshackles itself from both constraints today and dives into the fray. And just like that, those principles give way to power.”
“It is the dissent’s rhetoric that lacks restraint,” Alito snorted in reply.
Well … a hit dog will holler.
That’s it for today
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It’s a curious thing, these poor partisan hacks get infuriated when they’re caught do their crimes—Trump especially rails mightily whenever he’s caught.
Shelby County took the door off. Callais bricked up the room from the inside. Same Court, same project, twelve years apart, and we are still supposed to read each ruling as an isolated act of legal reasoning.
Alito rewrote the statute. Congress made the test effect, not intent, because intent is unprovable and discrimination wears a suit now.
Requiring Black voters to prove they were targeted as Black and not as Democrats, in a country where ninety percent vote one party, is not a legal standard. It is a permission slip. And grounding it in the Fifteenth Amendment means Congress cannot legislate around it. They know. That is the point.
Landry suspended only the House primaries. Not the Senate. Not the amendments. Ballots already sitting in mailboxes in Ramstein and Shreveport are confetti. The middle ages had more consistent rules.
Johan 🐌