Alito and Jackson’s fiery debate over the Voting Rights Act exposes Supreme Court tensions

By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — The November election is still a long way off, but patience is already running thin at the Supreme Court.

An explosive exchange between three conservative justices and liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson late Monday underscored a tension that has developed in voting cases as the court runs headlong into an election-heavy docket that will have far-reaching implications for the midterms.

Jackson accused the court of rolling over its “principles” in pursuit of influencing the November election.

Justice Samuel Alito fired back, calling that “insulting.” The conservative justice said Jackson’s dissent raised “trivial” and “baseless” arguments.

The heated back-and-forth over what amounted to a technical question about Louisiana’s congressional map comes as the high court is already juggling other appeals that could have consequences for this year’s election – not to mention a flood of short-fuse litigation expected this summer and fall.

“To avoid the appearance of partiality here, we could, as per usual, opt to stay on the sidelines and take no position,” Jackson wrote in a scathing dissent on Monday. “But, today, the court chooses the opposite. Not content to have decided the law, it now takes steps to influence its implementation.”

“What principle has the court violated?” Alito fired back in a concurring opinion joined by conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. “The principle that we should never take any action that might unjustifiably be criticized as partisan?”

Within the world of the Supreme Court, those words were unusually harsh, but it’s the latest example of tension behind the curtain slipping into public view.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s senior liberal, issued a rare public apology last month for suggesting earlier that Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s privileged upbringing influenced his approach to an emergency immigration case last year. A day earlier, Jackson spent more than an hour lambasting the court’s conservative majority for its handling of quick-turn cases.

More election decisions incoming

For decades, the Supreme Court cautioned courts against changing the rules of an election at the last minute. The “Purcell principle,” rooted in a 2006 Supreme Court decision, warns federal courts to avoid making late changes to the status quo.

But in the coming weeks, the court will rule on a Republican push to lift caps on how much money political parties may spend in coordination with candidates – a decision that could benefit Republicans by offsetting the advantage Democrats have typically enjoyed in small-dollar donations.

The court will also decide before June whether states may receive mail ballots that arrive after Election Day – a case inspired by baseless allegations from President Donald Trump about widespread vote-by-mail fraud. In March, the court indicated during oral arguments that it was prepared to side with Republicans in that appeal.

More immediately, the justices are being asked to decide in short order what to do with a request from Alabama to throw out a lower court decision that barred that state from redrawing its congressional maps before 2030.

The Yellowhammer State made that request following a blockbuster 6-3 decision last week that gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, enacted in 1965 to root out discrimination in redistricting and other voting practices.

That decision, too, drew a vigorous dissent from the court’s liberals. Justice Elena Kagan, writing for her colleagues, said that the ruling represented the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”

The decision has sparked a chaotic rush by several Southern states to redraw their maps in a way that would benefit the Republican Party while almost certainly limiting the number of minority members of Congress.

It also prompted the snarky exchange between Alito and Jackson.

Avoiding chaos in elections?

Just four months ago, in a case about Texas’ congressional map, a majority of the justices shot down a lower court decision against the state for “causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections.”

Though the court didn’t cite Purcell in the opinion directly, it was clearly a reference to the notion that courts should avoid injecting uncertainty into the process.

“When an election is close at hand, the rules of the road must be clear and settled,” Kavanaugh, a member of the court’s conservative wing, wrote in a 2022 decision allowing Alabama to vote on a map the court would later find likely violated the Voting Rights Act. “Late judicial tinkering with election laws can lead to disruption and to unanticipated and unfair consequences for candidates, political parties, and voters, among others.”

But in the Louisiana case, the court handed down its decision after mail ballots had already been sent out to voters.

And in the wake of the decision, Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, announced the state was suspending the May 16 primary election for House races. Other states – including Florida, Alabama and Tennessee – have already carried out a redrawing of their maps or are considering plans to do so.

“It strikes me as completely irreconcilable and inconsistent,” said Davin Rosborough, deputy director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project, who filed a lawsuit Monday attempting to stop Louisiana from suspending the congressional primaries. “I don’t know how the three of them can reconcile what they said with what the court has said over the past six years.”

Those decisions have spurred a glut of new lawsuits, including Rosborough’s, some of which may wind up at the Supreme Court before November.

In her dissent Monday, Jackson zeroed in on the apparent contradiction of a court that has for years urged caution in election matters suddenly upending elections in multiple states.

“There is also the so-called Purcell principle,” she wrote, “which we invoked only five months ago to chide a federal district court for ‘improperly inserting itself into an active primary campaign.’”

The tension evident in the Alito and Jackson opinions Monday was surprising given what was a relatively low-stakes issue. Usually, the Supreme Court issues its “judgment” 32 days after handing down the decision. That procedural step hands the case back to the lower court – in this case, allowing a special district court to dictate the next steps for Louisiana’s redistricting.

A group of White voters who challenged Louisiana’s map made the unusual (but not unheard of) request to expedite the handing down of the judgment. A majority of the court granted that request in a brief and unsigned order, but not until tensions spilled out onto the page.

“The dissent accuses the court of ‘unshackling’ itself from ‘constraints,’” Alito wrote in the final sentence of his opinion. “It is the dissent’s rhetoric that lacks restraint.”

Meanwhile, the fight over finalizing the Supreme Court’s decision continued Tuesday. A group of Black voters who defended Louisiana’s map filed a long-shot motion urging the high court to revoke the judgment to reconsider its decision in the case.

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