The Extreme Court on Monday night agreed to finalize its opinion in Louisiana v. Callais to allow Louisiana to redraw its Congressional district maps in time for the 2026 midterm elections.
The new map could allow Republicans to gain one or two seats in its six districts in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The SCOTUS clerk normally waits 32 days after a decision to allow for the losing party to ask the justices to reconsider their decision before sending a copy of the judgment to lower courts. SCOTUS said the Black voters at the center of the dispute “have not expressed any intent to ask this Court to reconsider its judgment.”
Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter, warning the court had caused chaos in Louisiana.
In her four-page dissent, Jackson suggested that the court itself was taking sides in the battle over redistricting. She wrote that developments in the wake of last week’s ruling in Callais “have a strong political undercurrent.” Louisiana’s effort to redistrict, she said, “unfolds in the midst of an ongoing statewide election, against the backdrop of a pitched redistricting battle among state governments that appear to be acting as proxies for their favored political parties.”
Jackson noted that only twice in the last 25 years has the court fast tracked the issuance of a decision to the lower courts, and suggested staying in their default position would avoid the “appearance of partiality.”
In a five-paragraph concurring opinion, Sam Alito called Jackson’s suggestion “baseless and insulting.”