Liam Conner
Washington – The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the lines of a congressional district in South Carolina that a lower court invalidated as an illegal racial gerrymander, handing a victory to Republican mapmakers who said they used politics, not race, as the predominant factor in drawing district lines.
O Decision 6-3 of the high court reverses the ruling of a three-judge district court panel that concluded that GOP lawmakers improperly used race in designing Congressional District 1, represented by Republican Rep. Nancy Mace.
In a majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court’s conservative justices said the district court’s conclusions were “clearly erroneous.”
South Carolina Republicans and the state chapter of the NAACP asked the justices to issue their ruling by January to ensure clarity for voters in the 2024 election. Arguments in the case took place in October and were one of the first of the court’s new term.
But as January came and went without a decision, GOP officials requested that the three-judge district court panel that oversaw the case suspend its own January 2023 ruling, invalidating the Congressional District 1 lines, which agreed to do in March. The judges’ order allowed the state to use the map it considered racially rigged for upcoming congressional races. The state primary is scheduled for June 11.
South Carolina Congressional Map
Located along the southeast coast of South Carolina and anchored in Charleston County, voters in Congressional District 1 elected Republicans to the House from 1980 to 2016. Democrat Joe Cunningham unexpectedly won the seat in 2018, but Mace won a narrow victory in the following Congress. election.
During the redistricting process that began in 2021, Republican lawmakers wanted to give the district a stronger Republican lean. To achieve this goal, they moved more than 140,000 of the district’s residents to Congressional District 6, long represented by Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn.
The new voting map was enacted in January 2022, and Mace was re-elected that November by a larger margin than he had two years earlier. But the South Carolina chapter of the NAACP and a voter in the district challenged the boundaries of Congressional District 1 as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and claimed the district was designed with racially discriminatory intentions.
After an eight-day trial, the three-judge panel agreed and concluded that GOP lawmakers impermissibly used a racial target and classified voters predominantly by race to achieve a partisan result.
The justices found that Republican mapmakers set a goal of 17% of the black voting-age population in Congressional District 1 and moved more than 30,000 black residents to Congressional District 6 to produce a stronger Republican lean. The district court blocked the state from holding elections using the Republican Party-drawn map for Congressional District 1.
South Carolina Republicans appealed the panel’s decision last February and argued that the district court failed to separate race from politics. Lawmakers said politics was the main motivating factor they considered during redistricting, which is allowed after the Supreme Court in 2019 said federal courts could not hear allegations of partisan gerrymandering, the practice of drawing voting maps to consolidate the party in power.
The battle over Congressional District 1 is the latest to reach the high court that emerged after the 2021 redistricting process. The justices in September 2023 rejected requests by Alabama officials to use a Republican-drawn congressional map in the state in the 2024 election, which a lower court said likely violated federal law.
This decision came after the high court upheld a decision which invalidated the boundaries of the state’s seven electoral districts. As a result, federal judges in October selected a new congressional map that will give the state a second district where black voters make up a significant portion of the electorate.
Similar disputes over voting lines in Georgia, Louisiana It is Florida They also worked, and a new map drawn in Louisiana could give Democrats an advantage in the November elections, when Republicans seek to maintain control of the House. The Supreme Court earlier this month opened the way that Louisiana use for the next elections a congressional map that includes a second district where the majority of voters are black, giving them the opportunity to elect their preferred candidate.
