Supreme Court sides with Republicans over South Carolina voting maps

WASHINGTON (CN) — South Carolina drew new district lines according to politics, not race, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday in a 6-3 decision in the state's favor.

The conservative supermajority said civil rights groups did not meet the standard to show that the legislature had created a racial gerrymander.

“The circumstantial evidence falls far short of showing that race, not partisan preferences, drove the districting process, and none of the expert reports offered by the challengers provides any significant support for their position,” Justice Samuel Alito, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote for the majority.

The lower court’s findings would allow challengers to reverse-engineer partisan data into racial data, according to the ruling.

“Under the district court’s reasoning, a litigant could repackage a partisan-gerrymandering claim as a racial-gerrymandering claim by exploiting the tight link between race and political preference,” Alito wrote.

The three liberal justices dissented, claiming that their conservative colleagues were rejecting precedent and mandating a new approach for racial gerrymandering cases that put lawsuits aimed at remedying race-based redistricting at a disadvantage.

“In every way, the majority today stacks the deck against the challengers,” Justice Elena Kagan, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote for the dissenters. “They must lose, the majority says, because the state had a ‘possible’ story to tell about not considering race — even if the opposite story was the more credible.”

Following the 2020 census, the South Carolina Legislature drew new congressional maps, shuffling 193,000 voters between two districts: the 1st and 6th Congressional Districts. The 1st District is currently represented by Republican Representative Nacy Mace; the 6th District has long been home to Democrat Representative Jim Clyburn.

Lawmakers added 53,000 people to Mace’s already crowded district — and then promptly removed 140,000 people. Those voters were removed and then added again to Clyburn’s district, the only majority-Black congressional district.

The changes created a more Republican-leaning district by moving all of Beaufort and Berkeley Counties into Mace’s district. The new maps also moved nearly two-thirds of the Black voters in Charleston County out of Mace’s district.

Civil rights groups said the reorganization diluted the votes of Black residents by sorting voters according to their race to achieve Republican lawmakers' political goals. Black South Carolinians historically have voted as a bloc, and typically for Democrats.

Lawmakers who drew the district lines said the maps may appear like a racial gerrymander, but really were partisan in nature. The Legislature said it used electoral data to give Republicans an advantage in upcoming elections.

After arguments in October 2023 lawmakers asked the justices to rule by the end of the year — a deadline that came and went without any word from the court. South Carolina Republicans submitted an emergency application asking the court to allow the challenged maps to be used during the 2024 election.

That application sat on the court’s emergency docket without any answer from the justices. A lower court intervened and ruled to allow the state to use the challenged maps in the 2024 election no matter how the court ruled.

In taking up the case, the justices agreed to decide if the three-judge appellate panel erred when it found that lawmakers diluted Black votes by redrawing the state's maps. The Supreme Court now has reversed that ruling.

Alito said the civil rights groups failed to produce any direct evidence finding that District 1 was drawn with a racial target and that the trial court’s findings show a connection between lawmakers’ partisan aim and the Black voting-aged population.

Plus, the lower court “paid only lip service” to the court’s precedents around race and politics in redistricting claims, he wrote, resulting in a “clearly erroneous” finding of racial gerrymandering.

The high court's majority faulted the civil rights groups for failing to create an alternative map showing that a legislature motivated by partisan goals would have designed a different map.

“Without an alternative map, it is difficult for plaintiffs to defeat our starting presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” Alito wrote. “This presumption of legislative good faith directs district courts to draw the inference that cuts in the legislature’s favor when confronted with evidence that could plausibly support multiple conclusions.”

The civil rights groups presented a political consultant's testimony as evidence that lawmakers couldn’t have drawn the map based solely on their political motives. Dale Oldham said the political data the Legislature cited was unsatisfactory, making it clear that South Carolina had used race instead.

Alito in the majority opinion contested the lower court’s reliance on the testimony, reasoning that one political consultant’s opinion could not settle the question of whether the state’s political data was inferior.

Justice Clarence Thomas joined most of the majority opinion but critiqued Alito for his deep dive into the facts of the case.

“The court’s searching review of the expert reports exceeds the proper scope of clear-error review,” the George H.W. Bush appointee wrote in a concurring opinion. “But, that analysis is not necessary to resolve the case.”

While Thomas didn't join the opinion of his three liberal colleagues, their dissent made a similar point. Kagan said in the dissent that the majority went “seriously wrong” in its factfinding about electoral districting and that the lower court’s findings deserved significant deference.

“The majority declares that it knows better than the district court what happened in a South Carolina map-drawing room to produce District 1,” Kagan wrote. “But the proof is in the pudding: On page after page, the majority’s opinion betrays its distance from, and lack of familiarity with, the events and evidence central to this case.”

Kagan wrote that the court has an important role in stopping the unlawful race-based division of citizens into electoral districts and rebuked the majority’s contention that claims of racial gerrymanders are weapons of political warfare.

Alito criticized these challenges for accusing states of offensive and demeaning conduct. Kagan said the court is not supposed to fear telling discriminators to stop discriminating.

“In adopting its novel credit-the-losing-state approach, the majority thwarts efforts to undo a pernicious kind of race-based discrimination,” Kagan wrote.

Alito dismissed those arguments, writing that “despite its length, the dissent boils down to six main points. None of them are valid.”

Thomas also chastised the court for its insistence on adjudicating redistricting claims. He said there are no judicially manageable standards for resolving these claims, leaving that task instead to the political branches. Thomas reiterated his view that the Constitution is colorblind and that redistricting cases have led the court to create doctrines that indulge in race-based reasoning.

“A colorblind Constitution does not require that racial considerations ‘predominate’ before subjecting them to scrutiny,” Thomas wrote. “Nor does it tolerate groupwide judgments about the preferences and beliefs of racial minorities. It behooves us to abandon our misguided efforts and leave districting to politicians.”

The Supreme Court heard arguments in the case in October 2023 and asked the justices to rule by the end of the year. However, that deadline came and went without any word from the court. South Carolina Republicans submitted an emergency application asking the court to allow the challenged maps to be used during the 2024 election.

Follow @KelseyReichmann

Categories / Appeals, Civil Rights, Elections

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Supreme Court sides with Republicans over South Carolina voting maps

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