Politics

The Supreme Court on Monday night cleared the way for New York to go forward with the 2026 elections using the state’s existing congressional map. Over the objections of the court’s three Democratic appointees, the justices granted a request from a Republican member of Congress, a group of voters, and state election officials to pause an order by a state trial court that would have required the state to redraw the map to add Black and Latino voters.

Justice Samuel Alito, who penned an opinion agreeing with the decision to put the order by Justice Jeffrey Pearlman of the New York Supreme Court, which is a trial court, on hold, called Pearlman’s order “unadorned racial discrimination.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who dissented from Monday’s ruling in an opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, accused her colleagues in the majority of executing an “unexplained about-face” from its normal practice of staying out of cases involving state election litigation.