It was hard to take Chief Justice John Roberts seriously when he said last week that Supreme Court justices aren’t “political actors.”
That’s not only because he made the remark coming off the court’s latest kneecapping of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, where the justices split 6-3 along the party lines of the presidents who appointed them, but also due to other recent rulings in which the GOP-appointed majority delivered decisions that align with Republican political goals.
The court’s latest election-related action on Monday night further weakened Roberts’ claim of apoliticism.
Splitting along those same party lines, the court granted an emergency request from Alabama officials who sought to harness the Callais case to upend a district court ruling that deemed their desired congressional map racially discriminatory. The Supreme Court majority obliged, with an unsigned and unexplained one-paragraph order vacating the district court’s judgment and sending the case back for further consideration in light of Callais.
It’s not unusual for new Supreme Court rulings to prompt such orders for lower courts to revisit their decisions that subsequently conflict with new high court precedent. But there’s more to the story here, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s four-page dissent for the three Democratic appointees pointed out.
In arguing that there was “no reason” for the high court to intervene on Alabama’s behalf, Sotomayor noted that the district court relied not only on the voting rights section the majority just gutted in Callais, but also on a finding that Alabama intentionally discriminated against Black voters under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
“That constitutional finding of intentional discrimination is independent of, and unaffected by, any of the legal issues discussed in Callais,” the justice wrote, leading her to deem Supreme Court intervention “inappropriate.” Joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sotomayor worried that the majority’s move “will cause only confusion as Alabamians begin to vote in the elections scheduled for next week.”
She further recalled that the Supreme Court had previously sided against Alabama in a 2023 case, Allen v. Milligan. In that one, Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the three Democratic appointees to form a majority in a surprise 5-4 ruling that supported the district court’s finding that the state’s map likely violated the section of the Voting Rights Act now gutted by Callais.
“This Court’s finding of racially discriminatory vote dilution is an inextricable, permanent feature of this case, and Alabama’s willful decision to respond by entrenching rather than remedying that dilution is, as the District Court correctly recognized, evidence of discriminatory intent,” Sotomayor wrote.
On top of the intentional discrimination issue that separates this Alabama case from Callais, Sotomayor said it was inappropriate for the majority to intervene even if Callais were implicated. “That is because Alabama’s congressional primary election is next week, and vacating the District Court’s injunction will immediately replace the current map with Alabama’s 2023 Redistricting Plan until the District Court acts, even though voting has already begun,” she wrote.
