Last week, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Louisiana’s congressional map with a second gerrymandered majority-minority district was unconstitutional. That ruling put Louisiana officials on the clock — they need to redraw their congressional maps before this year’s midterms.
On Monday, the court issued an order immediately putting last week’s Louisiana redistricting ruling into effect.
🚨 The Supreme Court has immediately issued its judgment striking down Louisiana’s congressional map as a racial gerrymander. pic.twitter.com/AQJjA5Sw2P
— SCOTUS Wire (@scotus_wire) May 4, 2026
And, of course, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson decided to make a scene about it. Justice Samuel Alito made sure she regretted that decision.
Normally, the Supreme Court waits 32 days after issuing a ruling before formally sending the case back to a lower court. Challengers to Louisiana’s map asked the justices to skip the wait — and the court agreed, issuing an unsigned order to accelerate the timeline so the lower court could oversee an orderly map-drawing process before elections.
Jackson couldn’t let that stand without throwing a hissy fit. She called the order “unwarranted and unwise,” and claimed the court was “unshackling” itself from procedural “constraints.” Her central argument was that the court should stick to its default 32-day rule, and that by moving faster, the majority was essentially sanctioning chaos in Louisiana’s election calendar. It was a sweeping condemnation of her colleagues — rhetorical and forceful.
The only problem? Nobody signed onto it with her.
Not one other justice — not even the two liberals who dissented in the underlying ruling — attached their name to Jackson’s dissent. That’s a remarkable fact. When you write a fiery dissent accusing your colleagues of abandoning judicial restraint, and even the justices who agree with you on the merits don’t want their names on it, something has gone wrong.
This is par for the course with Jackson; even her fellow left-wing justices think that she’s a moron.
But the best part is that Alito wasn’t about to let the accusations stand. He issued a sharp written response, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, firing back with surgical precision. “The dissent in this suit levels charges that cannot go unanswered,” Alito wrote, rejecting Jackson’s framing and pointing out that her approach would force Louisiana to hold elections under a congressional map that the Supreme Court had already ruled unconstitutional.
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Think about what that would mean in practice. A state holds an election. The map used to conduct that election has been struck down by the highest court in the land. Jackson’s answer to that problem is essentially: wait the 32 days anyway.
Alito closed by turning Jackson’s own language against her: “The dissent accuses the Court of ‘unshackl[ing]’ itself from ‘constraints.’ It is the dissent’s rhetoric that lacks restraint.”
Justice Alito has officially had enough of Justice Jackson. pic.twitter.com/6U6RhkUmoe
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) May 5, 2026
In short, that’s Alito telling Jackson, in print, that her writing lacks the basic discipline she claims to be defending. Unlike her dissent, Alito was joined by two colleagues who clearly felt the response was necessary.
Now that’s a humiliating public rebuke.
Jackson consistently positions herself as the court’s conscience — the justice willing to call out her colleagues for breaking norms. But, ultimately, she just positions herself as the court’s jester, who isn’t even that funny. It’s actually kind of frightening that she’s in such a powerful position.
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