Justice Samuel Alito has a well-documented aversion to criticism, whether from lawmakers, journalists, or colleagues on the bench. But his latest display of sensitivity—directed at Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—exposes a glaring double standard that cuts to the heart of the Supreme Court's ideological divide.
In Louisiana v. Callais, Alito authored the majority opinion that effectively gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by allowing the elimination of a Black-majority congressional district. The 6-3 conservative majority then waived the standard 32-day certification period, rushing the ruling into effect while voting was already underway. Jackson, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, dissented, warning that the expedited order risked “an appearance of partiality” and seemed to endorse Louisiana's effort to redraw its congressional map at the expense of minority voters.
Alito's response was swift and personal. In a concurrence joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, he called the dissent “baseless and insulting,” “groundless,” and “utterly irresponsible.” The sharp rebuke stood in stark contrast to his long history of silence—or outright participation—when the late Justice Antonin Scalia unleashed far more caustic attacks on the court's liberal bloc.
During Scalia's tenure, Alito never publicly objected to his colleague's rhetorical excesses. In King v. Burwell (2015), Alito joined Scalia's dissent that accused the majority of “interpretive jiggery-pokery” and “pure applesauce.” In Missouri v. Frye (2012), Scalia wrote that the court was “swinging a sledge” to reverse “perfectly valid, eminently just, convictions”—and Alito was on board. Even when Alito did not formally join, he remained silent while Scalia described majority opinions as “legalistic argle-bargle” from a “diseased root” in U.S. v. Windsor (2013), and a “judicial Putsch” lacking “even a thin veneer of law” in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).
Scalia's arsenal also included charges that colleagues endorsed a “sporting-chance theory of criminal law” akin to a “casino operator,” or perpetrated a “game of bait-and-switch.” Alito never raised an eyebrow. As legal scholar Steven Lubet notes, Alito was a “passive enabler” of Scalia's bombast, even when the barbs targeted opinions he had joined—such as when Scalia mocked an opinion as taxing “the credulity of the credulous.”
The timing of Alito's newfound sensitivity is telling. It emerged precisely when a dissent called out the political consequences of his own ruling. Jackson had warned that the Callais decision, by dismantling a minority district and fast-tracking the change, risked opening the door to the most sweeping dilution of minority electoral power since Reconstruction. Her prediction has already materialized: Tennessee, South Carolina, and Mississippi began similar redistricting efforts for this year's primaries, and Alabama secured a shadow-docket green light for its own majority-Black district dismantling.
Jackson has since been more outspoken than her fellow dissenters, cautioning the majority against “issuing rulings that are in the political realm.” Alito's reaction suggests that in his jurisprudence, harsh language is acceptable when directed at rulings that expand rights for same-sex couples or criminal defendants, but inexcusable when accurately describing the consequences of his own decisions.
The Callais case is a stark reminder of how the Supreme Court's conservative majority has wielded its power to reshape election law, often on an expedited basis and with minimal transparency. Alito's selective outrage only underscores the ideological stakes: for him, dissent is a weapon reserved for the other side.
