The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed South Carolina to continue using a federal district map that a lower court had ruled was an unconstitutionally racially discriminatory district map that led to the “exclusion of African-American voters.” .
The vote was 6-3, with the Supreme Court's three liberal justices dissenting.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court in Columbia, South Carolina, will rule in early 2023 that race will be a major factor in the state's 1st Congressional District, drawn after the 2020 census. The court unanimously ruled that it violated the Constitution.
The commission put its decision on hold while Republican lawmakers appealed to the Supreme Court, and both parties urged the justices to rule by Jan. 1. After the deadline passed, the commission said in March that the 2024 elections must be held based on the redistricting maps it rejected as unconstitutional.
“With the primary election process rapidly approaching, appeals to the Supreme Court still pending, and no remedy in place, the ideal must be reconciled with reality,” the committee wrote.
In effect, the Supreme Court's inaction has determined the outcome of this election cycle.
The Charleston-based contested district has elected a Republican every year since 1980 except for 2018. But the 2020 election was close, with the candidates separated by less than 1 percentage point, and Republicans “sought to tilt the district more Republican” after the 2020 census, the commission wrote.
The commission concluded that lawmakers accomplished their goal in part by “excluding African-American voters from Charleston County in the 1st Congressional District.”
The new House district map moves 62 percent of Charleston County's black voters from the 1st District to the 6th District. The 6th Congressional District has been the seat of Congressman James E. Clyburn, a black Democrat, for 31 years.
This move helped make the new 1st District a Republican stronghold. In November, Republican incumbent Nancy Mace won reelection by a 14 percentage point margin.
Republicans acknowledged that they redrawn the 1st Congressional District for partisan gain, but they said they didn't consider race in the process.
The commission ruled that the district's boundaries violated the Constitution, but it also rejected challenges to two other House districts, arguing that civil rights groups had failed to prove that they were drawn primarily with the purpose of diluting black voting power.
The Supreme Court requires states to scrutinize their actions very closely when race is found to be the primary reason for drawing districts. This principle, rooted in the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause, is often invoked to limit the creation of electoral districts that empower minority voters.
in this case, But the problem came from the opposite direction, with civil rights groups arguing that the map harmed black voters by shifting them from one congressional district to another.
In their appeal to the Supreme Court, South Carolina Republican lawmakers said the panel should have presumed they acted in good faith and analyzed the entire district, as required by Supreme Court precedent. insisted.
“The result,” the lawmakers wrote, citing an earlier ruling, “is a flimsy order premised on bad faith, riddled with 'legal errors' that falsely equate the racial impact of a single line in Charleston County with the racial superiority of the First District as a whole, and unfairly reduce plaintiffs' 'high' burden to prove that race was a 'primary consideration.'”
“The Commission correctly found that race is the primary means of gerrymandering,” the challengers, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told the judge.
“Even if the mapmakers used race as a proxy for politics, their overwhelming reliance on race is impermissible,” the plaintiffs' brief reads.
The case, Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP Convention (No. 22-807), is superficially similar to the Alabama case. In June, a court in the state ruled that state lawmakers had weakened the power of black voters in drawing legislative districts. However, the two cases deal with different legal principles.
The Alabama case was governed by the Voting Rights Act, a landmark civil rights law, and the South Carolina case was governed by the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause. Both can be pulled in different directions.