Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) officially asked the US Supreme Court to step in and protect New York’s lone Republican-held House seat from a “baseless” legal attack seeking to redraw the district ahead of the midterm elections.
In an emergency application filed Friday with Justice Sonia Sotomayor, lawyers for Malliotakis argued that a lower court’s “indefensible” ruling to scrap the current 11th Congressional District map was unconstitutional.
“The trial court’s order has thrown New York’s elections into chaos on the eve of the 2026 Congressional Election,” according to the application.
The filing pleads for an immediate stay before the midterm election season kicks off in less than two weeks.
Attorneys warned the legal limbo was “a recipe for unconstitutional chaos, with no map in place and uncertainty” as the clock ticks toward February 24, when nominating petitions are scheduled to begin circulating.
The long-shot appeal comes weeks after a Manhattan judge ruled the current map — which links Staten Island and Southern Brooklyn — as “unconstitutional.”
Judge Jeffrey Pearlman, who was once a staffer for Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul, ordered a new map that would increase the number of minority voters to prevent “unlawful vote dilution,” he wrote in his ruling.
Malliotakis’ legal team slammed the ruling as a radical departure from the status quo, noting in their application that the district “has largely maintained the same boundaries since the 1980s,” and has been repped by both Democrats and Republicans in the last decade.
The leap to the nation’s highest court comes at a procedurally odd moment for the case, as the original lawsuit is still weaving through the state appeals process.
The New York Court of Appeals — the state’s top court — recently washed its hands of the stay request, claiming it lacked jurisdiction and sent the case back to the lower Appellate Division.
An attorney for the Elias Law Group, one of the many Democrat-affiliated groups involved in the lawsuit, told The Hill that the application to the US Supreme Court was a “desperate appeal,” and “premature and improper.”
The emergency application tries to address those concerns by simultaneously hoping the state appellate courts will “put an end to this unconstitutional mischief,” and that the Supreme Court can intervene before Feb. 24 “if the appellate courts do not.”
“The US Supreme Court has been clear, racially-motivated redistricting violates the US Constitution,” Malliotakis told The Post.
“The Washington Democrats who brought this sham lawsuit have tried to manipulate our electoral and judicial processes by jamming through an unconstitutional order right before petitions are collected to prevent this case from being fully appealed,” she said.
