WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Thursday defended a Republican-held congressional district in South Carolina, rejecting a lower court ruling that said the district discriminated against black voters.
Liberal justices disagreed, warning that the court would protect states from accusations of unconstitutional gerrymandering based on race.
In a 6-3 decision, the court found that South Carolina’s Republican-dominated legislature did nothing wrong in redistricting when it strengthened Rep. Nancy Mace’s position in the coastal district by moving 30,000 Democratic-leaning black residents of Charleston out of the district.
“I’m very disturbed by the outcome. It’s as if we don’t matter. But we matter and our voices deserve to be heard,” said Taiwan Scott, a black voter who sued against redistricting.
President Joe Biden, whose administration supported Scott and the other plaintiffs before the Supreme Court, also criticized the ruling. “Today’s Supreme Court decision undermines the fundamental principle that voting practices cannot discriminate on the basis of race, and that is wrong,” Biden said in a statement.
Mace responded to the decision by saying, “It confirms everything everyone in South Carolina already knows, which is that this border was not based on race.”
The case presented the court with the thorny question of how to distinguish race from politics. The state argued that partisan politics, not race, and a population boom in coastal areas explain the congressional map. Shifting voters based on their political leanings is fine, the Supreme Court ruled.
A lower court had ordered South Carolina to redraw the district after finding that the state used race as an indicator of partisan affiliation, thereby violating the equal treatment principle of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
Thursday’s decision will have no direct impact on the 2024 election. The lower court had previously ordered the state to employ the disputed map in the November vote, which could support Republicans retain their narrow majority in the House of Representatives.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, criticized the lower court judges for their “misguided approach,” saying they failed to assume that lawmakers were acting in good faith and gave too much credit to opponents.
Alito wrote that a weakness in the black voters’ argument was that they did not present an alternative map, which he called an “implicit admission” that they could not have drawn one. “The district court’s conclusions are clearly wrong because they did not follow this basic logic,” he wrote.
Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the three liberals, said her conservative colleagues had ignored the lower court’s decision, which concluded that the district had been racially gerrymandered.
“Most disheartening,” Kagan wrote, was that the Court “adopted special rules to particularly disadvantage lawsuits seeking to remedy racially motivated redistricting.”
Richard Hasen, an elections expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, law school, agreed with Kagan, writing in a blog post that the decision “makes it easier for Republican states to redraw voting districts to help white Republicans maximize their political power.”
Janai Nelson, president and general counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said in a statement: “Our nation’s highest court gave the green light to racial discrimination in South Carolina’s redistricting and denied black voters the right to be exempt from race-based sorting. In doing so, it sent the message that facts, procedures and precedent will not protect the black vote.”
However, Senator Thomas Alexander, the leader of the South Carolina Senate, praised the ruling. “As I have stressed throughout the process, our plan was carefully crafted to meet statutory and constitutional requirements, and I was fully confident that we would prevail,” Alexander said.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering cases cannot be heard in federal courts. Justice Clarence Thomas, who was part of the conservative majority five years ago, wrote in a separate letter on Thursday that federal courts should also recuse themselves from resolving racial gerrymandering disputes.
“It is high time the Court put these policy questions back where they belong — in the political branches,” Thomas wrote. No other justice agreed.
When Mace first won election in 2020, she defeated Democratic incumbent Joe Cunningham by 1%, with 5,400 votes. In 2022, Mace won re-election with 14%, following redistricting based on the results of the 2020 census. She is one of eight Republicans who voted in October to remove Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., as speaker of the House.
The case differed from one in Alabama in which the court ruled last year that Republican lawmakers diluted the political power of black voters under the landmark Voting Rights Act by creating only one majority-black district. The court’s decision led to up-to-date maps in Alabama and Louisiana with a second district where Democratic-leaning black voters make up a significant portion of the electorate.
In South Carolina, the number of black voters in a redrawn district would have been smaller. But combined with a significant number of Democratic-leaning white voters, Democrats might have been competitive in the redrawn district.
The Supreme Court left one part of the case open: the question of whether the map was intentionally designed to dilute the black vote.
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Associated Press writers Ayanna Alexander and Farnoush Amiri contributed to this report.
