WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court’s review of a South Carolina congressional map next week could leave the justices trying to decide an age-old question: What comes first, the chicken or the egg?
Civil rights groups claim Republican legislators in South Carolina created an unconstitutional racial gerrymander in their redistricting effort following the 2020 census.
“The legislature used an unlawful means,” Adriel Cepeda Derieux, an attorney with the ACLU representing the groups, said in a media briefing. “It bleached Charleston. It selectively targeted areas where Black voters live to move them out.”
But lawmakers are quick to refute that claim, saying their goals were more of the partisan variety.
“This evidence establishing the political and race-neutral explanation for District 1 is the end of the case,” John Gore, an attorney with Jones Day representing the lawmakers, wrote.
The issue is that race and politics in the South are caught in a twisted web. Racial gerrymandering has been a fixture of South Carolina’s electoral politics, leaving Black residents to vote in a bloc. This means that racial gerrymandering and partisan gerrymandering will look the same.
The Supreme Court will have to decide if reducing the voting power of Black South Carolinians was legislators’ intention or the byproduct of trying to secure more Republican votes.
At issue are changes to two districts — the 1st District and the 6th District. Anchored on the state’s coast, the 1st District consistently elects Republicans. The 6th District, however, represents the middle of the state and is represented by the prominent Democratic Representative James Clyburn. This district is also the only majority-Black congressional district in the state.
Civil rights groups argue legislators should have moved around 85,000 people from the 1st District to the 6th District. Instead, lawmakers decided to move 193,000 people between the two districts.
The 2021 congressional map moved 53,000 people from the 6th District into the 1st District, which was already overpopulated. To account for the overpopulation, legislators then moved 140,000 people from the 1st District to the 6th District.
Through all this, the 1st District’s Black voting population stayed virtually the same, only increasing by one-tenth of a percentage point. Challengers to the maps claim this is because legislators knew they needed to maintain that number to give Republicans an advantage.
“The majority-white Legislature wanted to make sure that one tilted Republican, and it understood, because of South Carolina’s well-known voting patterns, that as the Black vote percentage inched up past 17% it'd be difficult to keep one safe, politically speaking,” Derieux said, speaking about the 1st District.
Basically, the civil rights groups say that because Black residents vote in a bloc, legislators used them to make a map favorable to Republicans. In doing this, legislators used Black voters to achieve their goal without having to face the consequences of racial gerrymandering.
“What it turned out to be is that Black voters were used as political puzzle pieces in the state Legislature’s attempts to ensure and insulate the legislative majority party's power, and that cannot stand,” Mitchell Brown, senior counsel for voting rights at Southern Coalition for Social Justice, said in a media briefing.
Lawmakers claim the 2021 map was created using electoral data. They argue changes to the 1st District were necessary to increase the Republican vote share to 54%. Essentially, Republican legislators say changing the maps in any other way would have favored Democrats, an outcome they wanted to avoid.
“All of Appellees’ proposed alternatives — Senate Amendment 2a, both NAACP plans, and the League of Women Voters Plan — harm the General Assembly’s political goal by turning District 1 into a majority Democratic district, with Democratic vote shares ranging from 51.7% to 52.6%,” Gore wrote.
Legislators' 2021 map removed 62% of Black residents from Charleston County and eliminated every precinct but one with more than 1,000 Black voters. During an eight-day trial with 42 witnesses and 652 exhibits, a three-judge panel said maintaining the 1st District’s Black voting-age percentage was evidence that legislators racially gerrymandered Charleston County. The panel said the racial target was critical to achieving lawmakers’ partisan goals.
Unlike other redistricting battles to come across the high court’s docket, it’s not clear how a ruling in this case will translate in upcoming elections. However, civil rights groups argue the result is still critical for the state.
“We all know communities who lack representation also lack resources because the political leaders for those communities know that those voters do not influence their decisions and they're not accountable for those voters,” Antonio L. Ingram II, assistant counsel with NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said.
The voting rights groups say it's because of this representation issue that the case is about more than just one congressional election in South Carolina.
“This is not just about a right to vote,” Ingram said. “It's about how Black communities are harmed when their votes are diluted. It's about how every voter in this country has protections by our Constitution to have their vote count.”
South Carolina’s 2022 election was already conducted with the unconstitutional map, so both parties in the case have asked the justices to hand down a decision in the case by January.
Follow @KelseyReichmann
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