Split Supreme Court sides with GOP in South Carolina redistricting case

The U.S. Supreme Court on May 23 handed a victory to South Carolina Republicans, ruling against a challenge to an electoral map they devised that moved 30,000 Black residents out of a coastal Carolina congressional district.

Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP was being closely watched ahead of the Nov. 5 U.S. election in which the presidency and control of both chambers of Congress will be decided. Democrats lost their majority in the 435-seat House in the 2022 election and are hoping to overcome the slim Republican majority this year, with every competitive district crucial to the outcome.

The justices reversed a lower court’s ruling that the Republican-drawn map violated the rights of Black voters under the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law.

The court’s conservative majority said in a 6-3 decision that the Republican-controlled state legislature did nothing wrong during redistricting when it strengthened Rep. Nancy Mace’s hold on the coastal district, reported the AP.

In dissent, the AP reported that the liberal justices said the ruling would “impede racial gerrymandering cases generally.”

The state argued that partisan politics, not race, and a population boom in coastal areas explain the congressional map. Moving voters based on their politics is allowed, the Supreme Court has held. A lower court had ordered South Carolina to redraw the district after it found that the state used race as a proxy for partisan affiliation in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. But that court had put its order on hold and had already allowed the state to use the challenged map in the 2024 elections, reported the AP.

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 the challengers, reported the AP.

Mr. Alito wrote that one weakness of the Black voters’ case was that they did not produce an alternative map, which he called an “implicit concession” that they couldn’t have drawn one, reported the AP. “The District Court’s conclusions are clearly erroneous because it did not follow this basic logic,” he wrote.

Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the three liberals, said her conservative colleagues ignored the work of the lower court that found the district had been gerrymandered by race, reported the AP.

“Perhaps most dispiriting,” Ms. Kagan wrote, the court adopted “special rules to specially disadvantage suits to remedy race-based redistricting," reported the AP.

Republicans hold a 217-213 margin in the House.

Ongoing legal battles over redistricting in several other states could be enough to determine control of the House in the election.

The South Carolina legal fight centered on a map adopted in 2022 by the Republican-led state legislature that redrew the boundaries of one of the state’s seven U.S. House districts – one that includes parts of Charleston along the Atlantic coast.

A federal three-judge panel in January 2023 ruled that the map unlawfully sorted voters by race and deliberately split up Black neighborhoods in Charleston County in a “stark racial gerrymander.”

Gerrymandering is a practice involving the manipulation of the geographical boundaries of electoral districts to marginalize a certain set of voters and increase the influence of others. In this case, the state legislature was accused of racial gerrymandering to reduce the influence of Black voters, who tend to favor Democratic candidates.

The boundaries of legislative districts across the country are redrawn to reflect population changes measured by the census conducted by the U.S. government every decade. In most states, redistricting is done by the party in power.

The new map in South Carolina increased the district’s share of white voters while reducing its share of Black voters, which the lower court referred to as “bleaching.”

The map shifted 30,000 Black residents who had been in the 1st congressional district into the neighboring 6th congressional district, which stretches 125 miles inland from Charleston. These voters were unlawfully “exiled,” the three-judge panel wrote.

The 6th district has been held for three decades by Democrat Jim Clyburn, one of the most prominent Black members of Congress. Mr. Clyburn’s is the only one of South Carolina’s House districts held by a Democrat.

With the district’s previous boundaries in place, Republican Nancy Mace only narrowly defeated an incumbent Democrat in 2020 – by just over 1 percentage point, or 5,400 votes. With the redistricting, Ms. Mace won re-election in 2022 by 14 percentage points. She is among eight Republicans who voted in October to oust Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., as House speaker, reported the AP.

The Supreme Court heard arguments in the case in October. The parties in the dispute had asked the Supreme Court to decide the case by the end of 2023.

In a separate redistricting ruling, the Supreme Court on May 15 restored a newly drawn Louisiana electoral map that includes two Black-majority U.S. House districts, rather than the one present in a previous version. The justices temporarily halted a lower court’s decision throwing out the new map, allowing its use in this year’s election.

The case differed from one in Alabama in which the court ruled last year that Republican lawmakers diluted Black voters’ political power under the landmark Voting Rights Act by drawing just one district with a majority Black population. The court’s decision led to a new map with a second district where Democratic-leaning Black voters comprise a substantial portion of the electorate, reported the AP.

In South Carolina, Black voters wouldn’t have been as numerous in a redrawn district. But combined with a substantial set of Democratic-leaning white voters, Democrats might have been competitive in the reconfigured district, reported the AP.

This story was reported by Reuters. Material from The Associated Press was used in this report.