Supreme Court justices spar over Louisiana’s effort to speed up elimination of majority-Black congressional district |

The Supreme Court cleared the way Monday for Louisiana to redraw a hotly contested congressional map that the court ruled days earlier was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, a highly technical decision that nevertheless sparked a bitter back-and-forth between three conservatives and a member of the court’s liberal wing. The brief order dealt with a question about when the Supreme Court’s blockbuster decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act took effect in Louisiana. The state is quickly gearing up to redraw its maps ahead of this year’s midterm elections and suspended its US House primaries following the high court’s ruling Wednesday. More notable than the decision itself, which was widely expected, was the tension it exposed in brief writings by Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a liberal. Writing in dissent, Jackson said the post-decision “developments have a strong political undercurrent.” And she suggested that the court should have stayed on the sidelines “to avoid the appearance of partiality.” “Not content to have decided the law,” Jackson wrote of the majority, “it now takes steps to influence its implementa

May 4, 2026 → May 8, 2026