Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito attends a meeting with Mons. Laurence John Spiteri, in Rome, Sept. 20, 2025. (Andrew Medichini/AP)
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The Supreme Court on Monday evening overturned a New York state court ruling that found that the Staten Island-based district of Republican US House Rep. Nicole Malliotakis discriminated against Black and Latino voters and needed to be redrawn. The Supreme Court’s intervention preserves a GOP-led seat that would have been likely to shift to Democrats this November.
The court’s ruling sets a disturbing precedent for voting rights in several ways. Federal courts are supposed to defer to state courts on matters of state law. And the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that courts should not change election laws in the middle of an election season, and in this instance the filing deadline for candidates in New York has already passed.
Alito is essentially saying that districts drawn under the Voting Rights Act or other federal and state laws to remedy centuries of racial discrimination are as racist as the racism they were meant to rectify.
In her dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted the court’s conservative majority for using one set of rules to uphold redistricting maps that benefit white voters and Republicans in states like Texas while using a completely different set of rules to strike down maps that benefit racial minorities and Democrats in places like New York.
“Time and again, this Court has said that federal courts should not interfere with state-court litigation,” Sotomayor wrote. “Time and again, this Court has said that federal courts should not meddle with state election laws ahead of an election. Today, the Court says: except for this one, except for this one, and except for this one.”
The majority did not explain its reasoning, but most concerning was the concurring opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, in which he wrote that districts drawn “for the express purpose of ensuring that ‘minority voters’ are able to elect the candidate of their choice” represented “unadorned racial discrimination, an inherently ‘odious’ activity that violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause except in the ‘most extraordinary case.’”
Alito is essentially saying that districts drawn under the Voting Rights Act or other federal and state laws to remedy centuries of racial discrimination are as racist as the racism (including the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow) they were meant to rectify.
Court watchers speculate that Alito, because he has not authored an opinion from the court’s term last October, is writing the majority opinion in a hugely important case the court has yet to rule on concerning the constitutionality of the last remaining section of the Voting Rights Act. If that’s the case, the VRA—and by extension, the fate of American democracy—will be in very, very bad shape.
The Roberts court has repeatedly gutted the VRA and if it were to rule that it is unconstitutional for states to draw districts that allow voters of color to elect their candidates of choice that would essentially spell the death of the country’s most important civil rights law. Based on his opinions in other major voting rights cases and his concurrence in the New York case, Alito seems certain to kill the VRA outright or narrow it to the point of irrelevancy.
If the court were to rule against the VRA this spring, that could shift roughly a dozen seats in the GOP’s favor this year, turbocharging Trump’s efforts to manipulate the midterms. Alito is now telegraphing just how far he’s prepared to go.
