Ketanji Brown Jackson: Supreme Court Louisiana Ruling Has Created "Chaos"

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Last week, the Supreme Court made a catastrophic decision to undermine black voters power in the South, especially black women. And in the wake of that decision in Louisiana, Justice Katanji Brown Jackson, the first black woman to serve as a justice in the Supreme Court, called out the chaos that is breaking out. And conservative Justice Samuel Alo responded with a harsh rebuke. Of course, when it comes to the Supreme Court, all of this language is so steeped in legal ease that it can be hard to tell what's happening. But what's clear is that Justice Brown Jackson is one of the only people willing to call out what's happening right now, which have already rolled back decades of gains in civil rights and undermined the ability for the United States to be considered a democracy at all.

[00:00:50]Newsweek reports that Justice Brown Jackson made these comments as actual chaos is being unleashed across Louisiana and other southern states that are rushing to gerrymander and give themselves a massive advantage. Last Monday, the Supreme Court decided that Louisiana did not need to create majority minority districts in line with the Voting Rights Act that is supposed to prohibit racial discrimination in voting. This move ultimately weakens the power of minority voters, especially black voters in the south and black women most of all. These new redistricting efforts happening in southern states take away the voting power from these minority residents and use it to create more Republican seats.

[00:01:34]It's blatant corruption and Justice Brown Jackson has every right and even a responsibility to call it out. Newsweek reports that this doesn't just change things in Louisiana's elections, but that it also opens the door for Republican controlled states like Alabama, Georgia, and Florida to redraw their maps in ways that were previously illegal, potentially flipping as many as 19 Democratic held seats by 2028. When it comes to the case in Louisiana that made its way to the Supreme Court and ushered in this change, the conservative justices are bending every rule in the book to try to throw a major upset in favor of the Republicans in Louisiana.

[00:02:14]This order was signed by conservative justices Alo, Thomas, and Gorsuch. And Jackson, who is one of the three liberal justices, dissented, writing, "The court's decision in these cases has spawned chaos in the state of Louisiana," highlighting how the timing of elections in the state. And she highlighted that mail and ballots were already sent overseas to military voters last month. So, the timing of this election has been completely thrown off, and people who have already voted are going to improperly have those votes denied." Jackson continued on to write, "By April 29th, the date on which the court released its decision holding that Louisiana's current congressional map is an unconstitutional gerrymander, some Louisiana voters had already mailed back their filledin ballots." She then wrote, "Whatever might happen to Louisiana's congressional map in the future, this election is already underway and must continue pursuant to the current maps."

[00:03:12]and she concluded the court unshackles itself from both constraints today and dives into the fray and just like that those principles give way to power because this abandon is unwarranted and unwise respectfully I desent what she's basically saying here is that the court has allowed itself to become politicized and that it's actually inserting itself into the fate of an election which is blatantly against everything the Supreme Court is supposed to stand for. Katanji Brown Jackson has every right to call this out. In fact, it's necessary for historic record to demonstrate the reality of what's happening here. She's a minority on the court, but she does have the power and the right to dissent and she's using that to point out that the conservative Supreme Court justices are doing something blatantly wrong. And because of that, Samuel Alo rebuked her.

[00:04:05]Newsweek reports that he wrote, "The descent accuses the court of unshackling itself from constraints. It is the descent's rhetoric that lacks restraint." So, it's written in legal ease, but it's a pretty stern rebuke coming from one of her colleagues on the court despite her dissent being written respectfully. And it's worth contextualizing just how much racism and misogynir Justice Katanji Brown Jackson has faced being the first black woman to serve on the Supreme Court. The amount of racist and sexist stigma she's endured and overcome to get to this point is enormous and cannot be understated. And when her conservative colleagues make attacks like these, they feed into those racist false narratives.

[00:04:49]Over on X, the racist toxic place it has become. You have Manhattan Institutes Ilia Shapiro writing, I wonder if Joe Biden in his lucid moments regrets picking his Supreme Court justice based on sex and race rather than merit. And he's writing this over Scott's wire, you know, captioning what Justice Alo had said about Jackson. So he's perpetuating this racist narrative that the only reason she was awarded this position on the court is because she was some sort of diversity hire when the reality is that she was supremely qualified and continues to be one of the most vocal, logical, and frankly sane people on the Supreme Court today. She's actually better and more just than her conservative peers, but they're able to fall back on these convenient racist narratives to try to undermine her and her success. As this Blue Sky user notes, they have created this entire mythology around Justice Jackson being stupid, where her stupidity is refusing to accept the ascendant conservative legal norms. And those norms look a lot more like ascendant conservative corruption at the highest court in the land. And it's also important to note that myths about black people's intelligence and inferiority have long been the justification for racist conventions and genocide. So, it's no coincidence that you have Justice Alo treating Justice Jackson like this at the exact same moment that he and his conservative peers are using their power to suppress black women's right to vote and their right to elect representatives who truly represent them. All of these attitudes are connected and when they're allowed to flourish, they escalate into more overt expressions of violence over time. We see that in the past. We see it in the present and we see it in the future if we don't call it out and hold it to account. But with the Supreme Court the way it is, we can't rely on the traditional justice system to hold itself to account because it is at the very center of this manufactured corruption. And in the wake of this corrupt Supreme Court decision, Newsweek reports that a number of states, primarily Republican ones, are already hoping to redraw their maps to exclude minority voters and hold on to their advantages, adding more seats to the ones that they already have in their congressional majority. This works against the Democratic will of the voters. Because instead of making sure that people are equally and fairly represented through voting, this actually just skews the maps in the Republicans's favor. making it so that they can't lose, even if that's what voters really want, which is exactly what we're going to see at the midterms.

[00:07:34]And what we're seeing now are Republicans throwing everything they have at the wall to see what sticks.

[00:07:40]Blue states like New York and New Jersey are considering redistricting plans, but they face obstacles, and courts aren't always going to side with blue states the same way they side with red states, giving the Republicans even more of an unfair advantage. Meanwhile, states like Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina are already moving to redraw those maps. This is a huge issue, not just for the Democratic Party, but for the existence of democracy in the United States at all.

[00:08:10]The right to vote, the right to democratically elected representation, and the right to participate in politics are cornerstones of democracy, and they're all being denied right now, especially for black women and black voters in the South. Justice Katanji Brown Jackson is one of the lone dissenters, not just in the Supreme Court, but also at the level of power she possesses at all. Which is exactly why she's under so much attack and why so much of that attack is rooted in racist and sexist stigma. They can't call her out for any valid reasons because she's the one calling them out for valid reasons. So, they have to undermine her credibility in ways that are just plainly racist. The only way this changes is if Democrats are able to regain a majority in the Supreme Court and push for a roll back of this conservative authoritarian agenda.

[00:09:01]They're already setting us up for decades of work to come. We have to challenge it and follow Justice Katanji Brown Jackson's lead, not shy away from stating the obvious.