Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has blasted the Supreme Court’s handling of a high-profile redistricting case in Louisiana and warned that such decisions risk damaging the country.
Speaking at an event hosted by the American Law Institute in Washington, D.C., on Monday, the liberal justice condemned the move to allow Louisiana to redraw its maps ahead of the midterms shortly after it shot down a majority-Black congressional district and weakened the Voting Rights Act.
The move by the nation’s highest court will be strongly favorable to Republicans in November’s elections, where the party is trying to gain any advantage it can ahead of expected losses. It will also reduce the number of Black lawmakers in Congress.
Jackson said that the Supreme Court needs to be “really, really careful” not to appear politically motivated, and that it failed to do so by gutting the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana and allowing new maps to be drawn even as early primary voting had begun.
“Courts are apolitical, not supposed to be issuing rulings that are in the political realm,” Jackson said, via CNN.
“We have to be scrupulous about sticking to the principles and the rules that we apply in every case and not look as though we’re doing something different in this kind of context.”
The Supreme Court’s decision to fast-track its ruling on Louisiana arrived just days after it ruled that the state’s 6th congressional District—currently held by Black Democrat Cleo Fields—had been an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
Louisiana had urged that the decision on whether to allow its maps to be redrawn be fast-tracked by the Supreme Court, rather than follow the usual one-month period for a ruling to be certified and sent back to a lower court.
The court announced the decision in a one-paragraph order without offering any explanation or revealing how it voted. Jackson, the first Black woman to sit on the Supreme Court bench, was the only justice to note her dissent.
“Public confidence is really all the judiciary has,” Jackson added at Monday’s event, via the Associated Press. “Everyone believes the court system is outside the political sphere. I think that means it’s incumbent on us to do things, to act in ways that shore up public confidence.”
In her dissent, Jackson said the Supreme Court had “spawned chaos” in Louisiana by waiving the usual 32-day certification period, noting that some mail-in ballots had already been sent out in the state.
A concurring opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito rejected the criticism and stated that the congressional map in question was “unconstitutional.” Alito also blasted Jackson’s other criticism of the rulings as “trivial at best” and “baseless and insulting.”
