Southern Republicans Are Already Deleting Black Districts
A group of Louisiana voters filed a lawsuit last week to resume the election, but have not yet succeeded at having the executive order stayed by a court. The Supreme Court, for its part, does not seem interested in delaying the inevitable. Earlier this week, the justices voted to immediately issue the court’s mandate for the lower courts instead of waiting the usual month, drawing a rare dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“Not content to have decided the law, it now takes steps to influence its implementation,” she wrote, referring to the internal rule that governs this specific process. “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 Samuel Alito, the author of Callais, issued a separate statement joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch to attack Jackson’s dissent. He claimed, among other things, that her preference for “unthinking compliance” with the court’s usual rule itself would create the “appearance of partiality” on “behalf of those who may find it politically advantageous to have the election occur under the unconstitutional map.” The irony of making this argument to ensure a state could racially gerrymander Black voters out of electoral power eluded Alito.