SCOTUS Justice Blasts Colleagues in Scathing Dissent

Liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted her conservative colleagues for “disregarding both democratic values and the rule of law” in a blistering dissent to a decision allowing Alabama to eliminate a majority-Black district at the 11th hour.

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The justices voted 6-3 to grant an emergency request filed by Republican officials to use a congressional map in this year’s midterms that was approved in 2023 but had never been used because a lower court found the map intentionally discriminated against Black voters.

But in an , the Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked the lower court’s decision on the grounds that the judges hadn’t adhered closely enough to the VRA ruling, Louisiana v. Callais.

The conservative justices also accused the lower court of interfering with Alabama’s maps despite the election being “imminent,” saying that states can decide to make last-minute changes to their elections, but federal courts should not “alter the election rules on the eve of an election.”

The state’s primaries were originally supposed to take place on May 19, but Alabama’s Republican leaders suspended the election while they raced to take advantage of Callais to eliminate one of the state’s two majority-Black districts and boost Republicans’ chances in six of the state’s seven districts.

In her dissent, Obama-appointee Sotomayor wrote that the conservative justices had rejected an “orderly election, held under a tried-and-tested congressional map” and instead chose “a chaotic election, held under a never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians.”

The new map will require state officials to change the voter registrations of hundreds of thousands of voters in a matter of days, despite Alabama previously saying the task would take months, added Sotomayor, who was joined in her dissent by liberal justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Alabama also adopted the map “in unashamed defiance of a prior court order directly affirmed by this Court,” Sotomayor wrote.

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In 2023, the Supreme Court upheld a ruling rejecting another Alabama map drawn in 2021 that eliminated a majority-Black district.

“Just as Alabama doubled down on racial discrimination, the Court today doubles down on chaos,” Sotomayor wrote.

The April 29 decision in Callais struck down Louisiana’s political map and set off a rush across the South to overturn maps that had been drawn to comply with the VRA, the Civil Rights-era law restricting racial gerrymandering and racial discrimination in voting in former Jim Crow states.

The conservative justices then voted to allow the decision to take effect immediately, even though primary ballots had already been sent to military and overseas voters.

The decisions set off a torrent of criticism accusing the conservative bloc of a hypocritical “raw exercise of power,” with the court appearing to intervene to help flailing Republicans in the midterms even as the justices admonished lower courts for interfering with electoral maps drawn by state legislatures.

Those complaints are only likely to intensify with Tuesday’s ruling.

In a statement, Alabama’s Republican Attorney General Steve Marshall praised the decision as “a major victory for Alabama and the principle of self-governance.”

The NAACP blasted the order “for continuing to unleash chaos in our democratic process” and said the court had given Alabama approval “to use a congressional map that had previously been found to be intentionally discriminatory.”