The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Louisiana v. Callais to bar racial gerrymandering, and in the process exposed a widening rift among the liberal justices themselves. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a solo dissent so combative that Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, took the unusual step of rebuking her in writing, calling her accusations "baseless and insulting."
The exchange, detailed by legal scholar Jonathan Turley, a Fox News contributor and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, offers a window into why some Democrats remain fixated on court-packing. When you cannot win on the law, you try to change the bench.
The majority in Louisiana v. Callais reaffirmed the use of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to ban intentional racial discrimination in the design of voting districts. The court effectively found many of Louisiana's challenged districts unconstitutional in their current form. That is not a partisan outcome, it is a straightforward application of existing law.
After the decision, the court issued a one-paragraph order noting that the defenders of the challenged districts had "not expressed any intent to ask this Court to reconsider its judgment." Other parties raised the practical need for states to address the ruling's impact with elections approaching. The Supreme Court's clerk normally waits 32 days after a decision to send a copy of the opinion and the judgment to the lower court, a routine procedural detail that would soon become the centerpiece of Jackson's objection.
Justice Jackson stood alone among all nine justices in demanding that the challenged districts be effectively preserved for the current election cycle. Not even her fellow dissenters, Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, who disagreed with the majority's ruling on the merits, joined her in this procedural fight.
That isolation is telling. Jackson claimed the ruling "has spawned chaos in the State of Louisiana" and alleged "a strong political undercurrent" behind the decision. She went further, writing that the case "unfolds 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 accused the majority of creating "the appearance of partiality" and said the order "is tantamount to an approval of Louisiana's rush to pause the ongoing election in order to pass a new map."
These are serious charges. They amount to an allegation that her colleagues acted not on legal principle but as political operatives. And she made them alone, without the support of the two other liberal justices who had every reason to join her if the claims held water.
Justice Alito did not let it pass. In a response joined by Thomas and Gorsuch, Alito dismissed Jackson's reliance on the 32-day clerk waiting period as "trivial." He described her broader dissent as one that "lacks restraint." And he addressed her insinuation of partisan motive directly, calling it "baseless and insulting."
Alito labeled the accusation of political bias "an unprincipled use of power" and, in language rarely seen in Supreme Court orders, called it "a groundless and utterly irresponsible charge." That three justices felt compelled to issue such a pointed written rebuke over a procedural order speaks to how far outside normal judicial conduct Jackson's dissent landed.
The fact that Jackson has drawn criticism even from fellow liberal Justice Kagan on separate occasions makes the pattern harder to dismiss as a one-off.
Since her appointment by President Joe Biden, Justice Jackson has developed a distinctive approach on the bench, one that prioritizes public expression of personal conviction over the institutional restraint traditionally expected of Supreme Court justices. She recently told ABC News: "I have a wonderful opportunity to tell people in my opinions how I feel about the issues, and that's what I try to do."
That candor is revealing. The role of a Supreme Court justice is to interpret law, not to broadcast feelings. Yet Jackson's framing suggests she views her opinions less as legal analysis and more as a platform, a megaphone aimed at the public rather than a reasoned exchange with colleagues.
This posture has shown up repeatedly. Jackson has stood alone in dissent in other recent cases as well, sometimes staking out positions that even her ideological allies on the court decline to endorse.
That should concern anyone who cares about the court's legitimacy. A justice who routinely accuses the majority of political bias, without the support of her own bloc, risks becoming the very source of the institutional damage she claims to oppose.
The internal tensions on the court's liberal wing are not new. A recent book reported that after the leak of the Dobbs opinion, Justice Kagan had a vocal confrontation with retired Justice Stephen Breyer. Kagan allegedly wanted to further delay the release of the dissents. Breyer reportedly agreed with Chief Justice John Roberts that conservative justices were facing increased death threats because of the delay.
That episode, a liberal justice allegedly pressing to extend a period of institutional crisis while colleagues faced physical danger, carries a troubling echo. It suggests that for some members of the court's left flank, the political impact of timing matters more than the safety and stability of the institution itself.
The broader pattern of leaks and internal dysfunction at the court has eroded public trust in ways that no single opinion can repair. Jackson's approach, publicly accusing the majority of political corruption in a case where she couldn't even persuade her own allies, only accelerates that erosion.
The real significance of Jackson's dissent is not legal. It is political. Her accusations of partiality and political maneuvering read less like judicial reasoning and more like a brief for the court-packing movement. If the majority is acting out of partisan bias, if the institution is rigged, then the remedy, in the progressive telling, is to add seats and appoint justices who will produce the "right" outcomes.
That argument depends on the premise that the current court is acting illegitimately. Jackson's dissent supplies that premise, even when the underlying decision, barring racial gerrymandering under the Voting Rights Act, is one that progressives might ordinarily celebrate.
A few states are now moving to delay primaries or draw new maps under tight calendars in response to the ruling. Those are real logistical challenges. But logistical challenges are not evidence of judicial corruption. They are the ordinary consequence of a court doing its job and striking down unconstitutional districts.
Liberal justices have increasingly framed their disagreements with the majority not as good-faith legal disputes but as indictments of the court's integrity. That rhetorical escalation serves a political purpose far beyond any individual case.
Perhaps the most damaging detail for Jackson is the one she cannot explain away: neither Kagan nor Sotomayor joined her. Both dissented from the merits of Louisiana v. Callais. Both had every incentive to stand with Jackson on the procedural question if her claims of partiality and chaos held up. They chose not to.
When your own ideological allies decline to endorse your accusations, the accusations look less like principled dissent and more like political theater. Jackson has a growing record of pointing the finger at the wrong targets, and her colleagues, left and right, appear to have noticed.
The Supreme Court exists to interpret the Constitution and federal law. It does not exist to validate the political preferences of whichever party last held the White House. When a justice accuses the majority of acting as political partisans, without evidence sufficient to persuade even her fellow dissenters, she weakens the very institution she serves.
Democrats who want to pack the court need the public to believe the court is broken. Jackson's dissent in Louisiana v. Callais reads like an audition for that narrative. The 6-3 majority applied existing law. The lone dissenter alleged corruption. And the two liberal justices in between said nothing, which, in the language of the court, says everything.
When the left's best argument for remaking the Supreme Court depends on a dissent so overheated that even sympathetic justices won't sign it, the argument answers itself.
