The Supreme Court has ruled that a Republican-drafted congressional district map was not unconstitutional. A lower court ruled the map unconstitutional, calling it racist gerrymandering. Thursday’s decision reverses the lower court’s ruling.
The court ruled 6-3. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the decision for the majority and Justice Elena Kagan wrote the dissent.
After the Republican-majority state legislature drew new congressional district lines following the 2020 U.S. Census, the South Carolina chapter of the NAACP challenged the map. A black voter from South Carolina named Taiwan Scott, along with the state’s NAACP chapter, said the state used racial data and moved thousands of black voters out of the district.
The redistricting had moved nearly two-thirds of Black voters in Charleston County from the 1st District to the 6th District, Amy Howe wrote for SCOTUSblog.
In January 2023, a federal court had ordered the state to create new congressional district maps by the end of March. The ruling said GOP leaders had moved black voters from the First District to the Sixth District. The justices said that when they drew the map, race was being unconstitutionally used in redistricting.
The three-judge panel relied on a case known as Cooper v. Harris. It was about the way North Carolina did redistricting. There, the court ruled that the redistricting plan was unconstitutional because race was the motivation for the plan and thus it violated the Equal Protection Clause.
Regarding the court’s ruling that the South Carolina map was unlawfully drawn on discriminatory grounds, Alito said the court “did not provide any direct evidence to support that conclusion, nor did it provide the direct evidence in the record.”
Alito said the employee who drew the maps “relied on political data from the 2020 presidential election, along with traditional district criteria and input from various lawmakers.”
“The circumstantial evidence cannot demonstrate that race, rather than partisan preferences, drove the districting process, and none of the expert reports offered by the challengers provide any significant support for their position,” Alito said.
In writing the dissent, Kagan said: “The majority intends to change the usual rules when it comes to addressing racial gerrymandering claims.
“The right answer to this case is not to erect new roadblocks that allow South Carolina to continue to divide citizens along racial lines,” Kagan said. “It’s about respecting the court’s plausible — no, more than plausible — findings that the state engaged in race-based districting.
“Especially in the electoral arena, where ‘ugly patterns of widespread racial discrimination’ have prevailed for so long, we must demand better – from ourselves, from our political representatives and especially from this court,” Kagan said.
Justice Clarence Thomas filed an opinion partially agreeing with the majority opinion, saying the courts should not hear these cases.
“In my opinion, the court has no power to decide these types of claims,” Thomas wrote. “Drawing political districts is a job for politicians, not federal judges. There are no legally manageable standards for resolving district claims, and in any case, the Constitution imposes these issues solely on the political branches.”
Previously, the court had ruled that courts should not interfere with partisan gerrymandering — opinions were divided along ideological lines. Both Alito and Thomas referred to this case in their statements.
“Partisan gerrymandering claims raise political questions beyond the reach of the federal government,” Chief Justice John Roberts said in the 5-4 majority opinion released in 2019. “Federal judges have no license to redistribute political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible attribution of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to constrain and guide their decisions.”
Kagan also quoted it, writing, “The simple fact is that politicians don’t like to pander to partisan gerrymanders: they often deny them as aggressively as they provoke them. That’s because ‘excessive district partisanship’ is ‘incompatible with democratic principles,’ and voters believe it to be so.”
“We are deeply disappointed in the Supreme Court’s decision to allow South Carolina’s proposed congressional map for yet another election, after a unanimous three-judge federal panel recognized the racial discrimination in that map and ordered that a corrective map would be used in the coming elections. this year,” said Scott, a prosecutor in the case.
Janette McCarthy-Wallace, general counsel of the NAACP, issued a statement after the ruling, calling it “a major blow to the ideals of democracy.”
“While the court may have failed in its duty to protect democracy, the collective power of the Black vote remains resolute – an unwavering force that transcends legal rulings and political maneuvering,” McCarthy-Wallace said. “Despite this legal setback, the NAACP stands in unwavering solidarity with its counterparts who are waging a legal battle to protect and expand Black voting rights.”
