Supreme Court Allows South Carolina’s GOP-Drawn Congressional Map, Rejecting Racial Discrimination Claim

WASHINGTON—A 6-3 Supreme Court approved a white-dominated congressional district enacted by South Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature, overruling a lower court that found the map divided Charleston County into different districts to reduce Black voters’ political power.

Because white voters heavily favor Republicans in South Carolina, the decision is a boon to the GOP incumbent, Rep. Nancy Mace, and good news for her party’s fight to retain its narrow House majority in the November election.

Writing on Thursday for the court’s conservative majority, Justice Samuel Alito recalled the court’s 2019 decision finding no constitutional problem with gerrymanders drawn to benefit the party in power. And in places where race and party preference are closely linked—as in South Carolina, where Black voters favor Democrats by 90% or more—plaintiffs must produce extraordinary evidence of racial bias before a court could find mapmakers violated the Constitution’s equal-protection guarantee, he said.

“We start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” Alito wrote, crediting the state’s claim that it sought to draw district lines that fortified Republican control of six of South Carolina’s seven congressional districts without regard to voters’ race.

No direct evidence of racial bias was produced, and circumstantial evidence plaintiffs entered didn’t rule out the possibility that moving a disproportionate number of Black voters out of the district “was simply a side effect of the legislature’s partisan goal,” Alito wrote.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joined Alito in full. Justice Clarence Thomas joined most of the opinion but wrote separately to argue it didn’t go far enough to limit court oversight of redistricting.

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the court had invited legislators “to use race as a proxy to achieve partisan ends,” allowing them even “to straight-up suppress the electoral influence of minority voters.”

She accused Alito of turning the legal standard “upside-down,” elevating the legislature’s claims over factual findings made by a special three-judge federal court after a nine-day trial involving some two dozen witnesses and hundreds of exhibits.

That the legislature’s goal was to help Republican political aims didn’t ameliorate racial discrimination in map-drawing, Kagan wrote. “One surefire way of making a South Carolina district more Republican is to make it less Black,” she wrote, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP and an individual voter challenged the state’s electoral maps. Thursday’s decision threw out a January 2023 ruling from the three-judge court that said the state’s First Congressional District was a racial gerrymander. That court had found two other challenged districts were permissible.

South Carolina Senate President Thomas Alexander on Thursday said the map was meticulously crafted to comply with legal requirements. “The Supreme Court affirmed the hard work of South Carolina senators and the product they produced as constitutional,” he said.

President Biden was less enthusiastic.

“The Supreme Court’s decision today undermines the basic principle that voting practices should not discriminate on account of race and that is wrong,” Biden said.

The Roberts Court has been skeptical both of policies that take account of race and of judicial review of political redistricting. Those strands came together in a 5-4 decision from 2013, Shelby County v. Holder, that significantly reduced federal power to police election procedures and legislative maps in states or regions that historically discriminated against minority voters.

Then in 2019, the 5-4 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause put an end to claims that partisan gerrymanders violated the federal Constitution, leaving the issue to state law.

But the court has left open at least some pathways to challenge racial gerrymanders under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Last year, a 5-4 vote upheld a lower court decision that Alabama violated the Voting Rights Act when it splintered a cohesive Black population into white-majority districts. Under a new court-ordered map, a second of Alabama’s seven congressional districts now has a Black majority.

And last week, the court issued an emergency order keeping in place, at least for the 2024 election, a Louisiana congressional map creating a second Black-majority district that a lower court had found the Voting Rights Act required.

But Thursday’s case, Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, involved facts that didn’t amount to a Voting Rights Act violation. For that reason, plaintiffs filed suit under the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause, where the standards of proof, already more stringent, now are tougher still.

Voting in South Carolina is racially polarized; the state’s House delegation includes six white Republicans and, in the sole Black majority district, Black Democrat Jim Clyburn.

The First District, which covers much of the state’s coast, had been closely contested in recent years, with Mace ousting a Democratic incumbent by less than 1% of the vote in 2020. Following the 2020 census, when congressional districts were redrawn to equalize their population, the Republican-led legislature bolstered the GOP grip on District 1, and in 2022 Mace won re-election with 56% of the vote.

Write to Jess Bravin at [email protected]