Supreme Court halts Dem effort to redraw New York congressional...

The high court’s intervention triggered a bitter dissent from the liberal justices, who accused the conservative majority of abandoning the court’s usual practice of not interfering in state election processes as filing deadlines near. New York’s filing deadline is April 6. “Time and again, this Court has said that federal courts should not interfere with state-court litigation. Time and again, this Court has said that federal courts should not meddle with state election laws ahead of an election,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Today, the Court says: except for this one, except for this one, and except for this one.” Justice Samuel Alito was the only member of the majority to offer a public rationale for the stay. He said it was necessary to fend off flagrantly unconstitutional use of race in the bid to redraw the boundaries. The case the justices addressed Monday differed from ones the high court wrestled with in recent months involving Texas and California, where the issues involved gerrymanders designed to increase a party’s power. The Supreme Court turned aside Democrats’ bid to block the GOP-led redistricting in Texas and the Republicans’ bid to block the Democrat-led redraw in California. But the New York challenge was explicitly about racial redistricting, a subject that the court has scrutinized more skeptically. A Democratic state trial court judge concluded in January that the makeup of the Malliotakis seat ran afoul of the state constitution because the candidates favored by Black and Hispanic voters rarely won.