Supreme Court backs South Carolina Republicans in race-based voting map
fight By John Kruzel and Andrew Chung
WASHINGTON, May 23 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court made it harder on
Thursday to prove racial discrimination in electoral maps in a major
ruling backing South Carolina Republicans who moved out 30,000 Black
residents when they redrew a congressional district. The 6-3 decision,
with the conservative justices in the majority and liberal justices
dissenting, reversed a lower court's ruling that the map had violated the
rights of Black voters under the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment, which
guarantees equal protection under the law. Conservative Justice Samuel
Alito wrote the decision. The liberal justices expressed alarm that the
decision makes it more difficult for legal challengers - who in this case
included the NAACP civil rights group, the American Civil Liberties Union
and Black voters - to demonstrate that an electoral map unconstitutionally
discriminates based on race. "What a message to send to state legislators
and mapmakers" who often have incentives to use race to achieve partisan
ends or suppress the electoral influence of racial minorities, Justice
Elena Kagan wrote in a dissent joined by the two other liberals. "Go right
ahead, this court says to states today." President Joe Biden, a Democrat,
said the ruling "undermines the basic principle that voting practices
should not discriminate on account of race." "This decision threatens
South Carolinians' ability to have their voices heard at the ballot box,
and the districting plan the court upheld is part of a dangerous pattern
of racial gerrymandering efforts from Republican elected officials to
dilute the will of Black voters," Biden added. Gerrymandering involves 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 Republican-controlled state legislature was accused of
racial gerrymandering to reduce the influence of Black voters. The fight
centered on the boundaries drawn in 2022 by the legislature for one of
South Carolina's seven U.S. House of Representatives districts. The new
map increased the district's share of white voters while reducing its
share of Black voters, which the lower court called "bleaching." Black
voters tend to support Democratic candidates. Alito wrote that there was
"no direct evidence" that race predominated in the design of the district
and that "circumstantial evidence falls far short of showing that race,
not partisan preferences, drove the districting process." The Supreme
Court sided with South Carolina Republicans who had argued that the
district, which includes parts of Charleston along the Atlantic coast, was
drawn to achieve partisan advantage. The Supreme Court in 2019 decided
that map-making for partisan gain was not reviewable by federal courts -
unlike redistricting mainly motivated by race, which remains illegal. The
boundaries of legislative districts across the country are redrawn to
reflect population changes every decade. In most states, redistricting is
done by the party in power. The lower court in March, because of the
length of time it took the Supreme Court to act after hearing arguments in
October, decided that the disputed map could be used in the Nov. 5 U.S.
election that will decide which party controls the House. Using this map
could undercut Democratic chances of regaining a House majority after
losing it in 2022. Republicans hold a 217-213 majority. Every competitive
district could be crucial to the outcome, with legal battles over
redistricting in various states still playing out. 'STARK RACIAL
GERRYMANDER' A federal three-judge panel in January 2023 ruled that the
map at issue unlawfully sorted voters by race and deliberately split up
Black neighborhoods in Charleston County in a "stark racial gerrymander."
Alito wrote that the panel took a "misguided approach." Alito also said
that lower courts should be skeptical when challengers like those in this
case fail to produce an alternative map capable of achieving a
legislature's "legitimate political objectives" but with greater racial
balance. "A plaintiff's failure to submit an alternative map - precisely
because it can be designed with ease - should be interpreted by district
courts as an implicit concession that the plaintiff cannot draw a map that
undermines the legislature's defense that the districting lines were
'based on a permissible, rather than a prohibited, ground,'" Alito wrote.
The ruling also threw out the lower court's finding that the map had
intentionally diluted the electoral power of Black voters, ordering it to
reconsider that issue using stringent criteria under Supreme Court
precedents. "We should demand better - of ourselves, of our political
representatives, and most of all of this court," Kagan wrote, adding that
the ruling "thwarts efforts to undo a pernicious kind of race-based
discrimination," and is "meant to scuttle gerrymandering cases."
Republican South Carolina state senator Thomas Alexander, one of the
parties who defended the map, said the court "affirmed the hard work of
South Carolina senators and the product they produced as constitutional."
The map shifted 30,000 Black residents from South Carolina's 1st
congressional district into the neighboring 6th district, the state's only
House district represented by a Democrat. With the 1st district's previous
boundaries, Republican Nancy Mace only narrowly defeated an incumbent
Democrat in 2020. With the redistricting, Mace comfortably won re-election
in 2022.