The Supreme Court's 6-3 conservative majority this week green-lighted new congressional maps in Louisiana and Alabama that eliminate majority-Black districts — releasing its Louisiana ruling less than three weeks before that state's May 16 primary, after sitting on the case for more than a year. Some Louisiana ballots had already been returned when Governor Jeff Landry suspended the election.
Said Kareem Crayton of the Brennan Center for Justice: "I don't think you can see this as anything other than a raw exercise of power."
Said election law scholar Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School: "It seems the Supreme Court is picking winners and losers, not doing law."
For the better part of two decades, the Supreme Court has wielded a doctrine called the Purcell principle — named for Purcell v. Gonzalez (2006) — as a near-absolute bar against judicial interference in elections once the process is underway. The logic was sound and the language was sweeping: “Court orders affecting elections, especially conflicting orders, can themselves result in voter confusion.” As an election draws closer, the court said, that risk only grows.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh was particularly fond of this framing. In a 2020 Wisconsin case, he wrote that “the court’s precedents recognize a basic tenet of election law: When an election is close at hand, the rules of the road should be clear and settled.” Courts, he argued, should not “swoop in and alter carefully considered and democratically enacted state election rules when an election is imminent.”
This week, the same court released a ruling with national Voting Rights Act implications fewer than three weeks before Louisiana’s congressional primary — after delaying action on the case for more than a year. The majority opinion did not mention Purcell. It offered no reasoning at all.
The pattern the court is now executing has a precedent, and it is not a comfortable one. Since Shelby County v. Holder (2013) gutted the preclearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act, states with histories of racial discrimination in elections have moved quickly — and repeatedly — to redraw maps in ways that dilute Black voting power. Courts block the maps; the Supreme Court lifts the injunctions; states hold elections under maps later found to be illegal. The cycle repeats.
What is new here is the brazenness of the timing. Louisiana’s primary was scheduled for May 16. Ballots were already in the mail. The court acted anyway. Alabama’s primary, originally set for May 19, is now pushed to August for the affected districts. These are not abstract constitutional questions — they are elections being physically rescheduled around a court order that the majority declined to explain.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissenting in the Louisiana case, invoked “the so-called Purcell principle” as a reason the court should have stayed its hand. Justice Samuel Alito called that critique “groundless and irresponsible.”
Election law scholar Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School put it plainly: the Purcell principle “seems like it’s really not a principle at all.”
The court’s December 2025 decision allowing Texas to use a new gerrymandered map — overriding a lower court block, months before primaries began — is the most direct exhibit. Justice Elena Kagan dissented: “If Purcell prevents such a ruling, it gives every state the opportunity to hold an unlawful election.”
Derek Muller of Notre Dame Law School offered the majority’s likely internal logic: Purcell technically applies to courts imposing new rules, not to courts lifting injunctions. That reading is defensible in isolation. But the court applied no such limiting construction in Texas, where it acted months early; it offers no construction at all in Louisiana and Alabama, where it acted days before balloting. Selective citation of a doctrine is indistinguishable from no doctrine.
The founders designed the federal judiciary to be the branch most insulated from political pressure precisely because it would be called on to referee political disputes. Alexander Hamilton’s argument in Federalist No. 78 — that judicial independence was the safeguard of rights against legislative and executive faction — rested on the assumption that the court would be legible: that its reasoning would be visible and consistent, regardless of outcome.
A court that invokes a principle when it restrains Democratic-aligned lower court rulings, then silently discards that principle when it enables Republican-drawn maps, is not behaving as a court in Hamilton’s sense. Chief Justice Roberts complained last week that the public wrongly sees the justices as “political actors.” A recent NBC News poll shows confidence in the court at an all-time low. The majority’s refusal to explain its reasoning in Louisiana and Alabama will not help that number.