Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson spoke at the American Law Institute and warned that the Supreme Court risks looking political after its handling of the Louisiana redistricting case under the Voting Rights Act.
KBJ argued the court must guard its public image, especially in election cases, because, as the AP reported, Americans expect judges to stand apart from partisan fights.
She spoke after writing a solo dissent from the court’s decision allowing Louisiana to move quickly to use new maps after the court’s conservative majority struck down a majority-Black district and weakened the Voting Rights Act.
“Public confidence is really all the judiciary has,” she said at a talk before the American Law Institute in Washington, D.C.
“Everyone believes the court system is outside the political sphere. I think that means it’s incumbent on us to do things, to act in ways, that shore up public confidence,” she said.
Polling has shown public trust in the Supreme Court at historic lows in recent years, and Chief Justice John Roberts has separately bemoaned a perception that the justices are “political actors,” calling it a misunderstanding.
That’s a fair-sounding statement; nobody wants the highest court in America to look like a cable news panel wearing matching robes.
Unfortunately, despite a fair-sounding message, the problem comes from the messenger. Jackson has become the court’s loudest progressive voice, and subtlety doesn’t appear to be her preferred instrument.
While the justice did not address the substance of the ruling in Louisiana v Callais, which put limits on protections for minority voters under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, Jackson did express concern about the rare move to immediately certify the ruling over the objection of a group of black Louisiana voters who said they were considering a petition for rehearing of the case.
She suggested that the court’s move – with no explanation and over a dissent she joined written by Justice Elena Kagan – may have looked like the justices taking sides. The practical impact has been the elimination of at least one majority-black district that has been represented by Democrats.
“The parties who were asking us to expedite the judgment [state Republicans] were doing so because they were embroiled in a political dispute over whether or not to apply the court’s ruling in the context of an ongoing election. …The parties who came to us said, ‘Please alter your rules, so that we can essentially have an advantage in the context of this political dispute.’ What I thought is that that should not be something that we should do,” Jackson said, “because it would look as though we were doing something unusual…to advantage this political party…that was asking us for political reasons to do it.”
In the Louisiana case, she dissented alone after the court allowed the state to quickly move with new congressional maps.
Hellbound and Down 