A legal expert shredded Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s “acrobatics” from his latest opinion in a major voting rights case during a new interview with Slate.
Janai Nelson, who argued on behalf of Louisiana voters in Louisiana v. Callais, told Slate staff writer Dahlia Lithwick in an interview that the Supreme Court’s decision in the case was “catastrophic.” The court decided that Louisiana’s election map, which had been challenged by a group that described itself as “non-African Americans,” constituted a racial gerrymander and paved the way for the court to shrink Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting.
“This is a day of infamy for the court,” Nelson told Lithwick. “It is a day of devastation for our democracy.”
She also noted that the decision stood in direct opposition to a similar case the Supreme Court decided in 2023 called Allen v. Milligan. In that case, the Supreme Court held that Alabama’s election map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by packing the state’s Black voters into a single district.
“I think what we can glean from the acrobatics in the Alito majority opinion is a degree of cowardice to admit that what they are doing is gutting what this same court, with a different constellation of justices, once called the crown jewel of civil rights legislation, and what this very court, in its current configuration, upheld in a 5–4 majority opinion just three years ago authored by Chief Justice John Roberts in Allen v. Milligan,” she added. “So in order for the justices to even come up with any sort of logical or seemingly logical veneer of rationality for this opinion, they had to engage in that twister effort to reconcile past decisions.”
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