Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor took her colleagues to task in a new dissenting opinion on Tuesday, arguing that they evaded the core questions raised in an election case and that their analysis of the facts was “wrong twice over.”
The case involved Alabama using a congressional map that a lower court found was intentionally designed to dilute Black voting power. Joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sotomayor accused the majority of choosing chaos over democracy and of rewarding Alabama’s years-long defiance of court orders.
Sotomayor noted that the majority’s opinion did not grapple with the lower court’s finding of intentional discrimination against Black voters even though the “record is crystal clear.”
She also called out her colleagues for misinterpreting their own ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, a case that allowed states to gerrymander their maps for partisan purposes even if it had a racially discriminatory effect.
Instead, Sotomayor argued that her colleagues chose to “disregard both democratic values and the rule of law.”
“The majority’s order grapples with virtually none of this,” Sotomayor wrote. “Indeed, it does not even acknowledge that the DistrictCourt’s discriminatory-intent finding is reviewed for clear error. Much of its reasoning rests on its assertion that, even as to the plaintiffs’ Fourteenth Amendment claim, ‘the District Court’s analysis departed from Callais.’ Ante, at 3. That is wrong twice over.”
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