WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Thursday preserved a Republican-held South Carolina congressional district, rejecting a lower court ruling that said the district discriminated against black voters.
In dissent, the liberal justices warned that the court was insulating states from allegations of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering.
In a 6-3 decision, the court found that South Carolina’s Republican-controlled Legislature did nothing wrong during redistricting, when it strengthened Rep. Nancy Mace’s hold on the coastal district by moving 30,000 black-leaning Charleston residents. Democrat out of the district.
“I am very disturbed by the result. It’s like we don’t matter. But we matter and our voices deserve to be heard,” said Taiwan Scott, a black voter who sued for redistricting.
But Mace, reacting to the ruling, said, “It reaffirms everything everyone in South Carolina already knows, which is that the line was not based on race.”
The case presented the court with the delicate question of how to distinguish race from politics. The state argued that partisan politics, not race, and a population boom in coastal areas explain the congressional map. Moving voters based on your policies is acceptable, the Supreme Court held.
A lower court ordered South Carolina to redraw the district after finding that the state used race as a proxy for party affiliation in violation of the equal protection clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
Thursday’s ruling will not have a direct effect on the 2024 elections. The lower court had already ordered the state to use the contested map in the November vote, which could help Republicans as they try to maintain their narrow majority in the House of Representatives. Representatives.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the court, criticized lower court judges for their “misguided approach” that refused to presume that lawmakers acted in good faith and gave too much credit to challengers.
Alito wrote that a weakness in black voters’ argument was that they did not produce an alternative map, which he called an “implicit concession” that they could not have drawn one. “The District Court’s conclusions are clearly flawed because they did not follow this basic logic,” he wrote.
Justice Elena Kagan, writing on behalf of the three liberals, said her conservative colleagues ignored the work of the lower court that found the district had been gerrymandered by race.
“Perhaps most disheartening,” Kagan wrote, was the fact that the court adopted “special rules to especially undermine processes to remedy race-based redistricting.”
Richard Hasen, an election expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, agreed with Kagan, writing in a blog post that the decision “makes it easier for Republican states to engage in redistricting to help white Republicans maximize their political power.” ”.
Janai Nelson, president and chief counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said in a statement: “Our nation’s highest court gave the green light to racial discrimination in South Carolina’s redistricting process, denied black voters the right to be free from race-based classification and sent a message that facts, processes and precedents will not protect the black vote.”
However, Senator Thomas Alexander, president of the South Carolina Senate, praised the decision. “As I have said throughout this process, our plan was meticulously crafted to meet legal and constitutional requirements, and I was completely confident that we would prevail,” Alexander said.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering cases could not be brought to federal courts. Justice Clarence Thomas, who was part of the conservative majority five years ago, wrote separately Thursday to say that federal courts should likewise abandon the work of arbitrating racial gerrymandering disputes.
“It is past time for the Court to return these political questions to where they belong – the political branches,” Thomas wrote. No other judge signed it.
When Mace first won election in 2020, she bested Democratic Rep. Joe Cunningham by 1%, less than 5,400 votes. In 2022, following redistricting driven by 2020 census results, Mace was re-elected by 14%. She was among eight Republicans who voted in October to remove Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., as speaker of the House.
The case was different from one in Alabama, where the court ruled last year that Republican lawmakers diluted the political power of black voters under the landmark Voting Rights Act by drawing just one district with a majority black population. The court ruling led to new maps in Alabama and Louisiana with a second district where Democratic-leaning black voters make up a substantial portion of the electorate.
In South Carolina, black voters would not be as numerous in a redrawn district. But combined with a substantial pool of Democratic-leaning white voters, Democrats could have been competitive in the reconfigured district.
The high court left open part of the case regarding whether the map sought to intentionally dilute the votes of Black residents.
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Associated Press writers Ayanna Alexander and Farnoush Amiri contributed to this report.
