Supreme Court clear the way on Thursday for South Carolina to continue using a congressional map that a lower court has deemed racially unconstitutional, resulting in the “whitewashing of African American voters” from a district.
The conservative majority, by a vote of 6 to 3, returned the case to the lower court, handing a victory to Republicans by allowing them to maintain the boundaries that helped make the district in question party stronghold.
The ruling’s immediate effect will be limited, as the court’s delay in issuing a ruling has ensured that this year’s election will take place under the disputed map. But the majority opinion, authored by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. writing, will have an impact beyond South Carolina in the coming years, said Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“Justice Alito’s majority on the court has once again laid out a legal framework that makes it easier for Republican states to engage in redistricting to help those in the minority,” said Professor Hasen. White Republicans maximize their political power.”
The ruling is the latest in a series of closely divided decisions on elections, a distinctive element of the court’s work led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. headed, including the rulings already amplify the role of money in politics, makes it easier to restrict voting And exempt from partisan gerrymandering from review in federal court.
The trend is not completely uniform, because The court ruled last year that Alabama lawmakers undermined the power of Black voters in drawing congressional maps. But the overall pattern has been to limit oversight of elections by Congress and the federal courts, often in ways that favor Republicans.
In the case decided Thursday, Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, No. 22-807, the court majority held that courts generally must recognize legislators’ assertions that the Their take on redistricting is partisan, which is allowed, rather than race-based, which it is not. “We begin with the assumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” Justice Alito wrote.
Citing previous decisions, he wrote that courts should avoid serious charges against state lawmakers.
“When a federal court finds that race drove the legislature’s redistricting decisions, it is declaring that the legislature committed ‘derogatory conduct,” he wrote. and demeaning’ ‘bears an unpleasant resemblance to political racism.’ We should not be so quick to hurl such accusations at the political branches.”
In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan accused the majority of erecting barriers to make it impossible to challenge the electoral maps as racists.
“The appropriate response to this case is not to introduce new barriers that would allow South Carolina to continue to divide its citizens along racial lines,” she wrote, in an opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Respect must be given to the district court’s reasonable — nay, more than reasonable — finding that the state engaged in racially based zoning. And to tell the state that it must redraw” the challenged district “this time without targeting African American citizens.”
Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joined Justice Alito’s majority opinion. In a concurring opinion, Justice Thomas said he would go further, moving away from the business of evaluating claims of racial discrimination altogether.
“The court has no authority to decide these types of claims,” he wrote. “Drawing political districts is the job of politicians, not federal judges. There is no judicially manageable standard for resolving zoning complaints, and regardless, the Constitution commits such matters exclusively to the political branches.”
A unanimous three-judge panel of the Federal District Court in Columbia, SC, rule in early 2023 that the state’s First Congressional District, created after the 2020 census, violated the Constitution by making race the predominant factor.
The panel paused its decision while Republican lawmakers appealed to the Supreme Court and the parties asked the justices to issue a decision by Jan. 1. Once that deadline passed , Council said in March that the 2024 election will have to take place according to the map it has rejected as unconstitutional.
“With primary election proceedings rapidly approaching, an appeal to the Supreme Court remains pending and no redress plan has been put in place,” the board wrote, “ Ideals must move towards reality.”
In effect, the Supreme Court’s inaction has decided the case for the current election cycle.
The contested district, anchored in Charleston, has elected a Republican every year since 1980, except 2018. But the 2020 race is close, with the gap between the candidates yet to come. one percentage point and Republican lawmakers “sought to create a stronger Republican Party.” tilt” in the county after the 2020 census, the board wrote.
The panel found lawmakers achieved that goal in part by “whitewashing African American voters out of the Charleston County portion of the 1st Congressional District.”
The new House map moved 62% of Black voters in Charleston County from District 1 to District 6, a seat that Representative James E. Clyburn, a Black Democrat, has held for 31 years.
This move helped turn the new 1st District into a Republican stronghold. In November, Republican incumbent Nancy Mace was re-elected by a margin of 14 percentage points.
Republican lawmakers admitted that they redrawn the 1st District for partisan gain. But they say they did not take race into account in the process.
The board ruled that the district’s boundaries violated the Constitution. But the panel rejected challenges to two other House voting districts, saying civil rights groups had failed to demonstrate that the districts were primarily drawn to undermine voting rights of Black people.
The Supreme Court has called for close scrutiny of a state’s actions when race is cited as the primary reason for drawing legislative districts. That principle, rooted in the Constitution’s equal protection clause, is often invoked to limit the creation of districts that enfranchise minority voters.
In this case, However, the challenge came from the opposite direction, with civil rights groups saying the map hurt Black voters by moving them from one congressional district to another.
IN Their Supreme Court appealThe South Carolina Republican Party argued that the board should have assumed it acted in good faith, as required by Supreme Court precedent, and analyzed the entire district.
“The result,” the lawmakers wrote, citing an earlier decision, “is a flimsily reasoned order claiming bad faith that falsely equates the purported racial impact of a single street in Charleston County with a racial preponderance throughout the 1st District, and riddled with ‘legal errors’ that alleviated the plaintiffs’ ‘demanding’ burden to prove that race was ‘primary consideration’ improperly.’”
The challengers, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told the judges that “the board correctly found that racing was the organizer’s primary vehicle.”
“The primary reliance on race is unacceptable even when mapmakers use race as a proxy for politics,” the challengers’ brief said.
The Court must address two elements of constitutional challenges to electoral maps, Justice Alito wrote.
“With respect to the federal Constitution, a legislature may pursue partisan purposes when engaging in redistricting,” he wrote. “Conversely, if the legislature gave race a dominant role in redistricting decisions, the resulting map would be subject to intense scrutiny and could be deemed unconstitutional.”
He added, “These lines of doctrine collide when race and partisan preferences are highly correlated.
Justice Alito criticized the challengers for not proposing their own maps. “Without an alternative map, plaintiffs are unlikely to defeat our initial presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” he wrote.
In dissent, Justice Kagan said the majority had presented a new and difficult requirement. “From today, courts must draw adverse inferences against those plaintiffs when they fail to submit so-called alternative maps — no matter how much evidence they present of malfeasance,” she wrote. violate the constitution”.
