Supreme Court considers South Carolina ballot card, ruled a racial Gerrymander
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court said Monday it would decide whether to reinstate a South Carolina congressional constituency after a lower court rejected it as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the Federal District Court in Columbia, SC, reigned in January that the state’s 1st congressional district, drafted after the 2020 Census, violated the Constitution by making race the predominant factor.
The district, anchored in Charleston, had elected a Republican every year since 1980, with the exception of 2018. But the 2020 race was close, with less than one percentage point separating the candidates, and Republican lawmakers “tried to create a stronger Republican streak. in the district after the 2020 census, the panel wrote.
The legislators achieved that goal, the panel found, in part because of the “bleaching of African-American voters from the Charleston County portion of Congressional District No. 1.”
The new House map moved 62 percent of black voters in Charleston County from the First District to the Sixth District, a seat Representative James E. Clyburn, a black Democrat, has held for 30 years.
The move helped turn the new First District into a Republican stronghold. In November, incumbent Republican Nancy Mace won reelection by 14 percentage points.
Republican lawmakers acknowledged that they had redrawn the first district for partisan gain. But they said they hadn’t taken race into account.
The panel ruled that the district’s boundaries should be redrawn before future elections are held. But the panel rejected challenges to two other House constituencies, saying civil rights groups had failed to show that the districts had been drawn primarily to water down black voting rights.
The Supreme Court has said lawmakers can take race into account when determining constituencies to comply with the Voting Rights Act, but cannot make it the predominant factor. That principle, rooted in the Constitution’s equal protection clause, is often invoked to restrict the creation of districts that empower minority voters.
In the new case Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, No. 22-807, the challenge came from the opposite direction, saying the map hurt black voters by moving them from one congressional district to another.
The Supreme Court will soon decide whether to allow a congressional map drafted by Republican lawmakers in Alabama. A lower court had said the card weakened black voter power and violated the Voting Rights Act. The South Carolina case raises several questions, centered on the principles of equal protection of the Constitution.
In their appeal to the Supreme Courtthe South Carolina Republicans argued that the panel should have assumed they had acted in good faith, as required by Supreme Court precedent, and analyzed the district as a whole.
“The result,” the lawmakers wrote, citing an earlier decision, “is an ill-founded order that presupposes bad faith, falsely equates the alleged racial effect of a single line in Charleston County with racial predominance in District 1, and is riddled with with “legal errors” unfairly absolving plaintiffs of their “demanding” burden of proving that race was the “predominant consideration.”
The challengers, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told the judges that “the panel correctly determined that race was the gerrymander’s most important vehicle.”
“That predominant reliance on race is illicit, even if mapmakers were to use race as a proxy for politics,” the letter from the challengers said.