The Supreme Court upheld South Carolina’s congressional redistricting on Thursday, ruling that legitimate partisan desires, not nefarious racial motives, drove the redistricting process.
The 6-3 decision, which divided the court along ideological lines, was a victory for Palmetto State Republicans who fought to preserve a map that was more favorable to their congressional delegation.
“The district court found that South Carolina painted the 1st District with a racial ‘targeted area,'” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion. In the NAACP’s decision in Alexander v. South Carolina Convention, he wrote:.
“However, plaintiffs have not presented any direct evidence to support that conclusion, and in fact, the direct evidence in the record suggests the contrary.”
All five conservative justices joined Alito, while liberal justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
Last year, a three-judge federal district court panel found that the redistricting of the state’s newly created 1st Congressional District, home to Rep. Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina), was racially unfair. It was determined that this was done.
A three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals ruled in March that the map must remain valid for the Nov. 5 election pending a Supreme Court decision.
“The enacted map achieves Congress’ political goals by increasing the projected Republican vote share in the 1st District by 1.36 percentage points to 54.39 percent,” Alito said in an opinion piece Thursday. “The plan also increased the Black Voting Age Population (BVAP) from 16.56% to 16.72%.”
In response to a district court ruling that the revised map illegally placed majority-black areas of Charleston in the already Democratic-dominated 6th Congressional District, Alito said, “Because of the close correlation between race and partisan preferences, this fact does little to demonstrate that the Congress’s choices were determined by race and not politics.”
“The excluded Charleston County precincts are 58.8% Democratic,” the judge added. “Thus, Congress’ stated partisan goals could easily explain this decision.”
Justice Clarence Thomas went a step further in his concurring opinion.
“In my view, the Supreme Court does not have the authority to decide these types of claims. It is the job of politicians to draw districts, not federal judges,” he concluded.
“There is no judicially manageable standard for resolving constituency claims, and yet the Constitution leaves these matters exclusively to the political branch.”
Thomas argued that racial gerrymandering allegations “ask courts to reverse engineer the purpose behind a complex and often arbitrary legislative process.”
South Carolina has seven congressional districts, all of which are held by Republicans except for the 6th, represented by Democrat James Clyburn.
Democrat Joe Cunningham reclaimed the seat in 2018 when the previous map was in effect, but lost to Mace in 2020 by just 1.3 percentage points.
In 2022, with new district boundaries drawn, Mace won by nearly 14 percentage points.
A challenge to the map was filed by the Educational Fund, the NAACP amicus curiae, and other civil rights groups, alleging that the map violates the 14th Amendment.
Although the plaintiffs did not rely on the Voting Rights Act of 1965, unlike other similar cases, Thomas blasted past Supreme Court decisions that cited the law, saying that “states will no longer be able to avoid these risks.” he claimed.
Kagan wrote a dissenting opinion criticizing the majority for disputing some of the facts determined by the district court’s panel, arguing that the Supreme Court should “show ‘due deference,’ meaning ‘ We must support it as long as it is plausible.”
“The majority cannot begin to justify fact-based decisions without rewriting the law in two ways, each of which would deter racial gerrymandering cases generally.” she wrote.
“Page after page of the majority opinion reveals its distance from and ignorance of the central events and evidence in this case.”
Kagan warned that Justice Alito’s ruling would make it much harder for federal courts to invalidate congressional districts that were unfairly drawn along racial lines.
She argued that the Supreme Court should have told South Carolina that “this time it must redistrict its 1st District without targeting its African American citizens.”
The South Carolina case is similar to an Alabama case in which a court ruled last year that Republican lawmakers illegally diluted the political power of black voters by drawing just one majority-black congressional district. It was different.
The court’s ruling drew a new map for the 2nd Congressional District in which Democratic-leaning black voters make up a significant portion of the electorate.
