As Trump dodges court orders, Samuel Alito suggests obeying judges can be optional

Justice Samuel Alito wants to know what a state should do if a court orders it to draw a new congressional map under faulty logic. Put more broadly, what should a litigant do if it believes that a court has made an order in error?

The answer, of course, is to obey the court order. Decisions can be appealed, and sometimes confronted through the political process. But if anyone could simply discard a court order they disagreed with, we would not be governed by the rule of law.

Alito’s query in Monday’s oral arguments in a redistricting case from Louisiana laid out a very different approach—one that is particularly troubling at this very moment, as the Trump administration is repeatedly disobeying court orders. The administration has not declared a right to ignore the courts, but its lawyers are toeing the line of malpractice in multiple cases by dodging court orders. Whether it is refusing to turn around planes carrying nearly 300 migrants to a labor camp in El Salvador or to release federal funding that the administration claims it can refuse to spend, the Trump administration is currently trying to blow past the orders of federal judges to enact its anti-democratic agenda.

Monday’s complicated case concerned how Louisiana drew a second majority-Black district as the result of rulings from both a federal district court and the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in another case, Robinson v. Landry. Alito wanted to know if obeying this court order was actually required:

“What if the Robinson decision were plainly wrong?” Alito asked. “Would you still have a good reason to follow it?”

Louisiana’s solicitor general, Benjamin Aguiñaga, agreed that a wildly bad decision might be the rare kind of situation in which a state could not rely on a court order to justify its new map. But Alito pressed on, positing even weaker cases where a court might be ignored:

“What if it weren’t wildly wrong?” the justice asked. “You look at it and it’s wrong. They misapplied something.”

Several other justices likewise questioned the correctness of Robinson before Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson stepped in to point out how dangerous this entire line of thinking is to the rule of law. “I’m still a little confused as to why it matters whether the court order was right or not,” Jackson said. “You were still being compelled by a court to do what you did in this case. Correct?”

Aguiñaga agreed, and Jackson continued: “Having a likely [Voting Rights Act] violation is all that was necessary for the state to take the steps that it did. So, I just don’t know that we need to even engage in the thought process of ‘What if the court order was wrong?’ It existed, and if it existed, then it seems to me that there is a good reason for Louisiana to have followed it.”

In other words, court orders are not optional. Aguiñaga, a former Alito clerk, agreed. “I’m not going to stand here and say that the Robinson courts were right,” he said at another point, “but I will say that what is set in stone is what they said. That is the law, and we took that as gospel.” That’s how it’s supposed to work.

Monday’s case, Louisiana v. Callais, isn’t about Donald Trump’s second term power grabs. Instead, it’s yet another case presenting the Supreme Court an opportunity to make it harder to enforce the Voting Rights Act’s protections for minority voters—and one that took a convoluted path to the high court. In June 2022, a federal district court ruled that, under the VRA, Louisiana must create a second majority-Black district in a state where Black voters were a third of the population but held a majority in only one of the state’s six congressional districts. That is the Robinson litigation. While the Supreme Court temporarily blocked that ruling for the 2022 election, its 2023 ruling concerning a similar situation in Alabama prompted the Fifth Circuit to reaffirm that Louisiana had likely violated the VRA. The state’s Republican-controlled legislature reluctantly held a special session in January 2024 to create a new majority-Black district that favored Democrats.  

A group of “non-African American” Louisiana voters then challenged that map, calling it “an odious racial gerrymander,” and in April 2024 a federal district court panel, with two Trump-appointed judges writing for the majority, struck it down, arguing that race had unconstitutionally been the predominant factor in drawing the district—even though Louisiana had been specifically ordered by another federal court to create the majority-Black district.

Civil rights groups and the state of Louisiana appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court, which allowed the new district to take effect for the 2024 election, leading to the election of Democrat Cleo Fields. The case represented an unusual instance when Black voters and a Republican-controlled Southern state were more or less on the same side—and also a rare example of the Supreme Court delivering a victory for minority representation, given the Court’s well-documented hostility to voting rights. That includes gutting the Voting Rights Act on multiple occasions and holding that partisan gerrymandering can’t be challenged in federal court.

But the uneasy alliance between civil rights groups and Louisiana is fraying. Though Louisiana defended the constitutionality of its congressional map, it also asked the Court to rule that racial gerrymandering claims, like partisan gerrymandering claims, can’t be brought before the Court. That would make it next to impossible for litigants to counter gerrymandered maps that target voters based on partisanship, race, or both. It has also argued, in separate litigation, that the core provision of the Voting Rights Act barring discrimination is unconstitutional.

The Louisiana case should be relatively straightforward, given its similarity to the Alabama case, Allen v. Milligan, decided by the Court less than two years ago. But civil rights opponents are trying to use it as a vehicle to further roll back representation for communities of color and deal another blow to the Voting Rights Act. And the GOP-appointed justices on Monday appeared eager to assist in this project, possibly even at the expense of Allen v. Milligan, a very recent decision.

As the Trump administration slashes agencies, halts spending without Congressional approval, and deports immigrants without due process—to name just a few of the dozens of illegal actions the new administration has carried out—Monday’s case seemed like a quaint concern, far removed from the current authoritarian threat facing the country. And in some ways it is—just another possible loss for voting rights, in a long line of decisions that have chipped away at access to the ballot.

But there is a through line connecting the attack on the voting rights of Black people and the will to flagrantly ignore bedrock democratic principles like following court orders. The GOP, with the assistance of the Roberts Court, has for more than a decade unwound minority voting rights. That lack of commitment to democracy creates a permission slip to take a sledgehammer to the Constitution by, for example, acting outside the law.

The third lawyer to argue Monday was Edward Greim, who represented the non-Black Louisianans trying to toss out the new map on the grounds that it relied too heavily on race. In 2020, Greim was one of the lawyers who tried to halt vote-counting in order to help President Donald Trump win the election. According to the Wisconsin Examiner, Greim later represented a fake elector from Wisconsin who was part of the plot to overturn the election results. Greim is a member of the Republican National Lawyers Association and the Federalist Society, where he is on the executive team of its Free Speech & Election Law Practice Group. That resume illustrates the line that links litigation meant to weaken the democracy and the willingness to attack it head on.

There are many Republicans and former Republicans who showed no angst at whittling away the Voting Rights Act but who, when confronted with Trump, refused to be part of his authoritarian project. But for others, the slow withdrawal from democracy was surely part of the journey to deciding to ditch it entirely. The fact that the Roberts Court may now toss even its own recent precedents in order to make it even harder for Black people to vote—and do so while questioning the value of following court orders—at the same time that the Trump administration is bulldozing the separation of powers and other bedrock democratic principles is not a coincidence. It’s part of the same project, the slow part and the fast part together.