Supreme Court rules South Carolina does not need to redraw congressional map to account for black voters

South Carolina Republicans do not need to redraw their congressional map, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday, saying a lower court did not properly evaluate the evidence when it ruled that lawmakers had discriminated against black voters.

In a 6-3 decision, the justices sent the case back to the trial court for further review.

“A party challenging the constitutionality of a map must separate race and politics if it wants to prove that the legislature was motivated by race and not partisanship. Second, in evaluating the work of a legislature, we begin with the presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” Samuel Alito wrote in an opinion that was joined by the court’s other five conservative justices.

“The three-judge district court only paid lip service to these proposals. This misguided approach infected the district court’s conclusions, which were clearly erroneous under the appropriate legal standard.”

The dispute centered on how the Republicans who control the state legislature redrew the state’s first congressional district after the 2020 census. Nancy Macé was narrowly elected in 2020, they changed the district boundaries to make it much friendlier to Republicans. As part of this effort, they moved 30,000 black voters from Mace’s first district to the sixth, currently represented by Jim Clyburn, a black Democrat. A lower court ruled that lawmakers impermissibly relied on race to redraw the district and told lawmakers to redraw it.

The case has dragged on so long, however, that the trial court and supreme court recently allowed South Carolina to use the district for this year’s elections.

The decision in the NAACP’s Alexander v South Carolina Conference is a huge victory for Republicans, who hold a slim margin in the US House with six of South Carolina’s seven congressional seats. It could also give lawmakers more leeway to discriminate in redistricting and use partisanship as racial representation. This could be extremely powerful in the American South, where voting is often racially polarized based on race.

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The challengers in the case, the South Carolina branch of the NAACP and a South Carolina voter, argued that these actions violated the 14th Amendment’s prohibition on classifying voters based on race. South Carolina Republicans argued they were motivated by partisanship, not race.

In 2019, the Supreme Court said there was nothing federal courts could do to stop gerrymandering based on partisanship. Classifying voters based on race, however, still remains illegal. This was the first case to reach the court since its 2019 decision, forcing justices to clarify their standard when the two issues mix.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan accused the court of making the “seriously wrong” decision and said her decision would make it more difficult for opponents to sue against discriminatory voting practices.

“In every sense, the majority today stacks the deck against their opponents. They must lose, says the majority, because the State had a ‘possible’ story to tell about not considering race — even if the opposite story was the more credible one,” Kagan wrote in the opinion, which was joined by the other two liberals in the House. court. judges, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

“When racial classifications in voting are at issue, says the majority, all doubts must be resolved in favor of the State, so that (God forbid) it is ‘accused’.[ed]’ of ‘offensive and humiliating’ conduct.”