Supreme Court allows disputed South Carolina voting map, a win for GOP

23/05/2024

The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed the use of a South Carolina congressional map that a lower court said “exiled” thousands of Black voters to carve out a district safer for a White Republican incumbent.

At issue for the court was whether South Carolina’s new map, which was created by the GOP-led state legislature and moved Black voters from one district to another, was permitted to bolster the Republican majority or was an unconstitutional effort to divvy up voters by race. The 6-3 conservative majority reversed the lower court finding that the map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander but gave Black voters a chance to continue the case using a different argument.

The decision marked a victory for Republicans not only because it clears the way for a map that is favorable to the GOP. It also sets a high bar for determining when a map can be considered a racial gerrymander, rather than a partisan one. The court has previously found that the Constitution bars racial gerrymandering but that federal courts cannot police partisan gerrymandering.

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. noted many predominantly Black precincts in Charleston were moved out of one district and into another. But “because of the tight correlation between race and partisan preferences, this fact does little to show that race, not politics drove the legislature’s choice,” he wrote.

He was joined by all members of the court nominated by Republican presidents: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the justices nominated by Democrats, said the majority got it “seriously wrong.”

“Perhaps most dispiriting is what lies behind the court’s new approach — its special rules to specifically disadvantage suits to remedy race-based redistricting,” Kagan wrote in an opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Kagan warned that the majority opinion sends a message to lawmakers and mapmakers to use race as a proxy to achieve partisan ends.

“And so this ‘odious’ practice of sorting citizens, built on racial generalizations and exploiting racial divisions, will continue,” she wrote. “In the electoral sphere especially, where ‘ugly patterns of pervasive racial discrimination’ have so long governed, we should demand better — of ourselves, of our political representatives, and most of all of this Court.”

Janai Nelson, president the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said the majority had taken important protections away from Black voters. Her group represents the Black voters who challenged South Carolina’s map.

“Today the voices of Black South Carolinians were muted, and if we are not careful the next set of votes denied could be those in your state,” she said in a written statement.

The case is one of several redistricting cases that have been closely watched because the U.S. House is so narrowly divided. Some of them won’t be conclusively decided until after this year’s elections and will determine districts for 2026 and beyond.

South Carolina had asked the justices to issue a decision by Jan. 1 so that this year’s elections could proceed smoothly, but the justices apparently needed more time. The slow pace of the case prompted the lower court — a three-judge federal panel — to rule last month that the state had to use the disputed map this year no matter how the Supreme Court ruled. With the state’s primaries slated for June 11, there was no time to draw a new map, the panel said.

The panel found last year that the map illegally split Black neighborhoods in the Charleston area to create a “stark racial gerrymander.” Rep. Nancy Mace (R), who had squeaked by her Democratic opponent in 2020, coasted to victory in 2022 in the redrawn district, keeping her seat in what has become a Republican-dominated 6-to-1 congressional delegation.

The judges found that South Carolina’s mapmaker tried to keep the Black population below a certain target in the district, treating Charleston County “in a fundamentally different way than the rest of the state.” Doing so would violate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, which prohibits state lawmakers from considering race as the predominant factor in adopting a new map.

After the panel rejected the map, South Carolina asked the Supreme Court to intervene, saying that maintaining Republican dominance was the reason for the changes, not race. The state also said the changes were partly to protect Rep. James E. Clyburn, the senior Democrat who is part of House leadership. Clyburn represents parts of Charleston County, and his district lost population over the past decade.

The fact that Black voters lean dramatically toward the Democratic Party often makes for legal battles after the redistricting that follows every decade’s census. The Supreme Court for more than a decade has issued decisions making it harder for Black voters to challenge redistricting plans. Thursday’s ruling adds to those difficulties by requiring much more explicit evidence that how a map was drawn was motivated by race.

“In the last decade, the racial gerrymandering cause of action has been one of the tools that minority voters have used to have better representation in Congress and in state legislatures,” said Richard Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the University of California at Los Angeles. “This makes it much more difficult to win those cases.”

The majority opinion reversed the lower court’s finding that the map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and found that it used the wrong standard in determining the map diluted Black voting power. The voters who brought the case said they would continue the case on the vote dilution claim to try to get a new map for 2026 and beyond.

Alito wrote that those challenging maps must “disentangle” race from politics to show that a map is racially gerrymandered — a difficult task because race and partisan leanings are so closely linked. What’s more, courts must start with a presumption that legislatures act in good faith when they draw maps, Alito wrote. The district court “paid only lip service” to those notions, he wrote.

Thomas wrote a lengthy separate concurrence in which he agreed with the majority’s conclusion but said the courts should not be in the business of deciding constitutional claims over voting lines. “Drawing political districts is a task for politicians, not federal judges,” Thomas wrote. In addition, he objected to a process of reviewing such claims in court that he said reduces Black voters to “partisan pawns and racial tokens.” The analysis, Thomas wrote, “is demeaning to the courts asked to perform it, to say nothing of the black voters that it stereotypes.”

Thursday’s ruling came after conservatives on the Supreme Court last month provided a surprise victory to Black voters in Louisiana by blocking a lower court that could have reduced the number of majority-Black congressional districts in the state from two to one. The Supreme Court’s order in that case affects only the 2024 election, and the justices could revisit what the state’s election map looks like for 2026 and beyond.

In a separate case last year, the justices held that Alabama had illegally designed its congressional map to undercut the power of Black voters. Roberts and Kavanaugh joined the court’s three liberals to form a majority, finding that the state’s plan violated the Voting Rights Act by not creating a second congressional district — out of seven in the state — where Black voters made up a large enough share of the electorate to have a strong chance of electing their candidate of choice.

The South Carolina case is Alexander v. the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP.