The Supreme Court upheld South Carolina’s congressional map Thursday, ruling that legitimate partisan aspirations rather than nefarious racial motives animated the district drawing process.
The 6–3 decision that split the Court along ideological lines amounted to a victory for Palmetto State Republicans who battled to preserve a more favorable map for their congressional delegation.
“The District Court found that South Carolina drew District 1 with a racial ‘target,’” Justice Samuel Alito, who authored the majority opinion, wrote in the decision for Alexander v. SC Conference of NAACP.
“But the Challengers did not offer any direct evidence to support that conclusion, and indeed, the direct evidence that is in the record is to the contrary.”
Alito was joined by all five of his fellow conservative justices while liberals Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
Last year, a three-judge federal district court panel determined that the contours of the state’s newly minted 1st Congressional District — home to Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) — were racially gerrymandered.
A three-judge panel in the appeals courts ruled this past March that the map must remain in effect for the Nov. 5 elections pending the Supreme Court’s decision
“The Enacted Map achieved the legislature’s political goal by increasing District 1’s projected Republican vote share by 1.36% to 54.39%,” Alito wrote in Thursday’s opinion. “The plan also raised the black voting-age population (BVAP) from 16.56% to 16.72%.”
In response to the district court’s finding that the revised map unlawfully placed predominantly black areas of the city of Charleston into the already safely Democratic 6th District, Alito said that “because of the tight correlation between race and partisan preferences, this fact does little to show that race, not politics, drove the legislature’s choice.
“The Charleston County precincts that were removed are 58.8% Democratic,” the justice added. “Thus, the legislature’s stated partisan goal can easily explain this decision.”
In his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas went a step further.
“In my view, the Court has no power to decide these types of claims. Drawing political districts is a task for politicians, not federal judges,” he concluded.
“There are no judicially manageable standards for resolving claims about districting, and, regardless, the Constitution commits those issues exclusively to the political branches.”
Thomas argued that racial gerrymandering allegations “ask courts to reverse-engineer the purposes behind a complex and often arbitrary legislative process.”
South Carolina has seven House districts, all of which are held by Republicans except for the 6th, which is represented by Democrat James Clyburn.
In 2018, when the former map was in effect, Democrat Joe Cunningham managed to flip the seat before losing to Mace by just 1.3 percentage points in 2020.
In 2022, with the new district boundaries in place, Mace cruised to victory by nearly 14 percentage points.
The challenge to the map was brought by the Educational Fund, NAACP Legal Defense, and other civil rights groups who claimed it violated the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
While the plaintiffs did not rely on the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as other similar cases have, Thomas railed against past Supreme Court rulings citing the legislation, arguing they “make it impossible for States to navigate these hazards.”
Kagan authored the dissent and knocked the majority for disputing some of the facts determined by the district court panel, arguing the Supreme Court is supposed to give “‘significant deference,’ which means we must uphold it so long as it is ‘plausible.’”
“The majority cannot begin to justify its ruling on the facts without in two ways reworking the law—each to impede racial-gerrymandering cases generally,” she wrote.
“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 warned that Alito’s opinion will make it very difficult for federal courts to nix congressional maps that have been improperly racially gerrymandered.
She contended that the Supreme Court should have told South Carolina “that it must redraw District 1, this time without targeting African-American citizens.”
The South Carolina case differed from a case out of Alabama in which the court ruled last year that Republican lawmakers unlawfully diluted black voters’ political power by drawing just one House district with a majority black population.
The court’s ruling led to a new map with a second district where Democratic-leaning black voters comprise a substantial portion of the electorate.
