Justice Jackson slams Supreme Court’s handling of rush appeal in Louisiana redistricting case
By John Fritze, CNN
(CNN) — Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson offered a blistering critique Monday of the Supreme Court’s handling of a recent high-profile redistricting case, asserting that the court needed to be “really, really careful” in the churn of an election year to avoid appearing political and suggesting it had failed to do so in that case.
“Courts are apolitical, not supposed to be issuing rulings that are in the political realm,” Jackson said at an event in Washington hosted by the American Law Institute. “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.”
Jackson’s remarks followed a series of questions from US District Judge Richard Gergel about the Supreme Court’s decision on May 4 to clear the way for Louisiana to redraw its congressional maps in light of a blockbuster decision days earlier that severely weakened the Voting Rights Act. After winning the larger case, Louisiana — eager to act on the decision ahead of this year’s midterms — urged the Supreme Court to bypass its usual month-long waiting period before finalizing its decision.
In a one-paragraph order, the court agreed to Louisiana’s request. It did so with little explanation and without disclosing how the court voted. Jackson, a member of the court’s liberal wing, was the only justice to note her dissent.
Jackson’s remarks Monday largely tracked with her written dissent. The court’s junior justice stopped short of saying she felt the decision itself was motivated by politics. Instead, she focused on her concern about the perception of the court taking sides in a political dispute.
“I think we have to be very constrained,” she said. “My view was it would be a more neutral way to handle the matter to just stick with the rule that we always apply in situations like this.”
The court’s decision in late April gutting the Voting Rights Act has set off a flurry of redistricting in southern states that has benefited Republicans and that is expected to also reduce the number of Black lawmakers in Congress. Though the decision was long expected, it nevertheless came in the middle of a push by President Donald Trump to eek as much advantage as possible out of redrawn maps in an effort to keep the GOP in control of the House next year.
Jackson, who was nominated to the bench by President Joe Biden in 2022, has been especially critical of the court’s approach to emergency cases during the Trump administration. That was manifested in a remarkable back-and-forth in the same case with Justice Samuel Alito, a member of the court’s conservative wing, who criticized many of Jackson’s points at the time as “insulting,” “trivial” and “baseless.”
“What principle has the court violated?” Alito wrote in his opinion in the Louisiana emergency case. “The principle that we should never take any action that might unjustifiably be criticized as partisan?”
Alito was joined by conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.
Jackson, who spent most of her talk Monday focused on her background and the memoir she published two years ago, also knocked the court more broadly for its handling of cases on the emergency docket. Those remarks largely echoed a lecture she gave at Yale earlier this year.
She said the court was undermining its ordinary process of hearing regular, merits cases by “setting up this other lane of adjudication” on the emergency docket.
“It’s not doing, I think, the court, the lower courts, or our country a service with that kind of procedure,” she said.
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