Justice Samuel Alito fired back at Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson after she accused the Supreme Court's conservative majority of an "unprincipled use of power", and the two liberal justices who had stood beside her just days earlier chose not to back her up.
The clash came in a follow-up order in Louisiana v. Callais, the redistricting case in which a 6-3 majority struck down Louisiana's congressional map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Jackson dissented alone from the Court's decision to speed the case back to a lower court. Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, who joined Kagan's dissent from the underlying merits decision, stayed silent on Jackson's latest broadside.
That silence speaks volumes. When your own ideological allies won't co-sign your accusation that the majority is rigging outcomes for one political party, the accusation may have outrun the evidence.
The dispute centers on Supreme Court Rule 45.3. Under normal procedure, the clerk waits 32 days after entering judgment before sending the opinion and a certified copy down to the lower court. The rule itself allows the Court or a justice to shorten or extend that window.
The Callais appellees asked the Court to issue the judgment "forthwith", immediately, so that a three-judge district court could, in Alito's words, "'oversee an orderly process'" if a judicial remedy were needed. Louisiana did not oppose the request. The Robinson appellants opposed it but, as Alito noted, "have not expressed any intent to ask this Court to reconsider its judgment."
Alito granted the application. The practical effect: the case goes back to the district court without the usual 32-day delay, and Louisiana's legislature, which Law&Crime reported is expected to imminently begin drawing a new, constitutionally compliant map, can get to work sooner.
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry had already suspended primary elections in the aftermath of the ruling. The expedited timeline gives the state a clearer path to hold elections under a lawful map rather than an unconstitutional one.
Jackson framed the procedural move as something far more sinister. She wrote that it unfolded "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."
She urged the Court to "stay on the sidelines and take no position by applying our default procedures" to "avoid the appearance of partiality." And she escalated further, writing:
"The Court's decision to buck our usual practice under Rule 45.3 and issue the judgment forthwith is tantamount to an approval of Louisiana's rush to pause the ongoing election in order to pass a new map."
Her closing was blunt: "And just like that, those principles give way to power. Because this abandon is unwarranted and unwise, respectfully, I dissent."
The word "respectfully" was doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. What Jackson described was not a procedural disagreement. It was a direct accusation that her colleagues traded principle for partisan advantage, an accusation of bad faith from the bench, aimed at the bench.
Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, did not let it pass. He wrote that Jackson had "level[ed] charges" against the majority "that cannot go unanswered." The internal tensions at the Court have been a recurring theme this term, but the sharpness here was unusual even by recent standards.
Alito called Jackson's insistence on rigid adherence to the 32-day default "trivial at best" and her broader accusation "baseless and insulting." He then turned the partiality argument back on her:
"[T]he dissent does not explain why its insistence on unthinking compliance with Rule 45.3's default rule does not create the appearance of partiality (by running out the clock) on behalf of those who may find it politically advantageous to have the election occur under the unconstitutional map."
That is the crux of the matter. The majority had already ruled the map unconstitutional. Running out the clock on a procedural default would have meant Louisiana's elections continued under a map the Court itself had just invalidated. Jackson never addressed why delay, rather than speed, served the interests of voters or the Constitution.
Alito called Jackson's charge of an "unprincipled use of power" what it was: "a groundless and utterly irresponsible charge." He pressed the point with a series of rhetorical questions:
"What principle has the Court violated? The principle that Rule 45.3's 32-day default period should never be shortened even when there is good reason to do so? The principle that we should never take any action that might unjustifiably be criticized as partisan?"
He closed by warning against "rhetoric that lacks restraint", a pointed message not just about this case but about the direction of dissenting opinions at the Court.
What makes Jackson's dissent even more notable is who did not join it. Kagan and Sotomayor had been full-throated in their dissent from the underlying merits decision. Kagan wrote that the majority's ruling would allow states to "systematically dilute minority citizens' voting power" and do so "without legal consequence." She argued that the Voting Rights Act's Section 2 was designed to "prohibit electoral schemes based on their vote-diluting effects, regardless whether a State could offer up some race-neutral explanation."
Kagan went further, writing that Congress "understood, just as the Court had, that even race-neutral actions could perpetuate purposeful racial discrimination. And it realized, again in the same vein as the Court, that race-neutral explanations could conceal race-based intent. Today's majority makes plain its disdain for those views." Sotomayor joined every word of that dissent. The liberal justices have not been shy about confrontational rhetoric in recent terms.
But when Jackson went a step further, accusing the majority of a partisan power grab on a procedural question where the losing state itself did not even object, Kagan and Sotomayor stayed quiet. They did not join her dissent from the forthwith order. They did not file their own.
The most plausible reading is straightforward: even the liberal wing recognized that Jackson's accusation overshot the mark. The procedural question was narrow. The rule explicitly allows the Court to shorten the 32-day window. The state that lost did not oppose the application. No party indicated it would seek rehearing. Calling this an "unprincipled use of power" required ignoring all of that.
This episode fits a pattern that has become familiar at the Supreme Court. The liberal minority, outnumbered 6-3 on major questions, has increasingly used dissenting opinions not merely to articulate an alternative legal view but to delegitimize the majority's decisions as politically motivated. That delegitimization campaign has allies on Capitol Hill and in progressive media, and it serves a clear political purpose: if the public can be convinced the Court is just another partisan body, the case for structural changes, court packing, term limits, jurisdiction stripping, becomes easier to make.
Jackson's dissent reads less like a legal argument and more like a press release aimed at that audience. The underlying merits decision in Callais itself involved a genuine legal disagreement about the scope of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and how courts should evaluate racial gerrymandering claims. The 6-3 majority, led by Alito, held that the map Louisiana drew with two majority-Black districts out of six, in a state where the Black population is roughly 33 percent, constituted the "very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids." Reasonable jurists can disagree about that conclusion.
But the follow-up order was not a close call. It was a procedural housekeeping matter that the rule itself contemplated. Turning it into an indictment of the majority's integrity was a choice, and it was a choice Jackson made alone. The Court has seen sharp ideological divides in election law cases before, but the accusation here went beyond legal disagreement into personal imputation.
Alito's concurrence was itself forceful. Calling a colleague's charge "groundless and utterly irresponsible" is not typical Supreme Court language. But there is a difference between responding to an accusation of bad faith and launching one. Jackson accused the majority of sacrificing principle for power. Alito responded by pointing out the factual basis, or lack thereof, for that charge.
The distinction matters. Courts depend on the assumption that judges, even when they disagree, are acting in good faith. When a justice publicly accuses her colleagues of partisan manipulation on a procedural question where the facts do not support the charge, she is not just losing a vote. She is eroding the institution she sits on. Alito has pushed back on similar overreach before, and the fact that he felt compelled to do so again, with Thomas and Gorsuch joining, suggests the conservative justices view this pattern as a serious institutional problem.
Kagan and Sotomayor apparently agreed, at least on this occasion, that Jackson went too far. Their silence is the most telling detail in the entire episode.
When your own side won't back you up, the problem isn't the institution. It's the argument.