The Supreme Court on Monday stepped into New York’s redistricting dispute, temporarily blocking a state-court order that would likely have turned a Republican-held congressional seat into a Democratic one.
The fight centers on New York’s 11th Congressional District, which covers Staten Island and a sliver of Brooklyn. The seat is currently held by Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis. On Jan. 21, a New York state trial judge concluded that the existing map diluted the voting strength of Black and Latino residents in violation of the state constitution and ordered the district redrawn.
Malliotakis and the Republican co-chair of the state Board of Elections quickly appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the justices to halt the redraw and calling the state-court ruling an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The state’s congressional candidate filing period was set to begin Feb. 24.
As in earlier mid-decade disputes this season, the Trump administration sided with the Republicans in seeking federal intervention.
Voters and the state of New York urged the Supreme Court not to intervene, saying the state-court process had not finished and it was premature for the high court to step in. They warned that bypassing state appeals would encourage future litigants to skip state courts altogether. The state also argued the matter should be resolved under New York law by New York courts and that there was time to settle it on the merits before ballots are set.
The unsigned majority order from the justices gave no detailed rationale. It explained only the duration of the stay: it will remain in place while the case proceeds through New York’s appeals courts. If a party seeks review from the Supreme Court and the court agrees to hear the dispute, the stay will extend until the court issues a final opinion. The majority’s explanation ran 101 words — a brevity that the three liberal justices criticized with the line “Rules for thee, but not for me.”
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. In her dissent, Sotomayor warned that allowing appeals from nonfinal state trial-court rulings to reach the Supreme Court would make “every decision from any court … fair game,” and cautioned that the court’s action thrusts it into election-law conflicts nationwide even as many states redraw maps before the 2026 cycle.
The court’s move in the New York case departs from its earlier reluctance this term to intervene in mid-decade redistricting. In two prior disputes — involving Texas and California maps — the justices declined to step in, letting newly drawn maps stand. Requests for the Supreme Court to weigh in on redistricting have been frequent this term and may continue to increase.
Earlier this month the high court allowed California to use a voter-approved map that favored Democrats. That map was drawn in reaction to a GOP-favoring plan in Texas that the Supreme Court also allowed to proceed. Observers expect those opposing shifts to balance each other politically.
Separately, the court has still not resolved a major Voting Rights Act challenge from Louisiana, where the legislature drew a second majority-Black district after the census. The state later sought to abandon that map and revert to a plan with only one majority-minority district. The Louisiana case has stretched over two terms; the justices, unable to resolve it last term, ordered a second round of arguments and added a new question: whether deliberately creating a second majority-minority district violates the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and Congress’s enforcement authority.
After the new question was added, Louisiana reversed course and opposed the map it had previously defended. How the Supreme Court will rule remains uncertain, but the tenor of oral argument in October suggested the court’s conservative majority may continue to narrow protections under the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
