The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday temporarily blocked a New York state-court order that would likely have transformed a Republican-held congressional seat into a Democratic one.
The dispute centers on New York’s 11th Congressional District, which covers Staten Island and a portion of Brooklyn and is represented by Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis. On Jan. 21, a New York trial judge found that the state’s map diluted the voting power of Black and Latino residents in violation of the state constitution and ordered the district to be redrawn.
Malliotakis and the Republican co-chair of New York’s Board of Elections quickly appealed to the Supreme Court, urging the justices to halt the redraw and calling the state-court ruling an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The state’s congressional candidate filing period was scheduled to begin Feb. 24, creating urgency for a resolution.
The Trump administration joined the Republicans in seeking federal intervention. Opponents of the stay — including voters and the State of New York — urged the Supreme Court to let the state-court process play out, arguing it was premature for the high court to step in and warning that bypassing state appeals would encourage future litigants to skip state courts. They said the matter should be resolved under New York law by New York courts and that there was time to settle the case on the merits before ballots are set.
The court’s unsigned majority order offered no detailed legal reasoning. It simply enjoined enforcement of the trial-court redrawing while the case proceeds through New York’s appeals courts, and it said the stay would continue if a party sought Supreme Court review and the court agreed to hear the case. The majority’s brief explanation ran 101 words — a concision that drew sharp criticism from the court’s three liberal justices.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. In her dissent, Sotomayor warned that permitting 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 intervention thrusts it into election-law disputes nationwide as many states redraw maps ahead of the 2026 cycle. The three liberals summarily criticized the majority’s approach with the line ‘Rules for thee, but not for me.’
The action marks a departure from the court’s earlier reluctance this term to intervene in mid-decade redistricting: the justices previously let new maps stand in separate Texas and California disputes. This term has seen numerous requests for Supreme Court involvement in redistricting, and those appeals appear likely to continue.
Separately, the court has not yet resolved a major Voting Rights Act challenge from Louisiana, where the legislature initially drew a second majority-Black district after the census and later sought to abandon that map. That case, spanning two terms, was complicated when the justices added a new question about whether deliberately creating a second majority-minority district could violate the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and Congress’s enforcement authority. Louisiana then reversed course and opposed the map it had earlier defended. How the court will ultimately rule is uncertain, though the tenor of oral argument suggested the conservative majority may continue narrowing certain protections under the 1965 Voting Rights Act.