The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Republicans in a crucial redistricting case for the state of South Carolina that had Democrats alleging “racism.”
Democrats and the NAACP had taken the legislature’s redistricting map to court claiming that it was racially discriminatory and a lower court agreed, telling the legislature that the map was unconstitutional.
The state, though, appealed the decision to the nation’s highest court and in a 6-3 decision, the court sided with conservatives and ruled that the lower court was wrong, that the map was not created to discriminate against minority voters, according to Fox News
For the majority, Justice Samuel Alito added that, “a party challenging a map’s constitutionality must disentangle race and politics if it wishes to prove that the legislature was motivated by race as opposed to partisanship. Second, in assessing a legislature’s work, we start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith.”
“In this case, which features a challenge to South Carolina’s redistricting efforts in the wake of the 2020 census, the three-judge District Court paid only lip service to these propositions,” Alito continued.
“That misguided approach infected the District Court’s findings of fact, which were clearly erroneous under the appropriate legal standard,” Alito added.
“No direct evidence supports the District Court’s finding that race predominated in the design of District 1,” Alito continued. “The circumstantial evidence falls far short of showing that race, not partisan preferences, drove the districting process.”
“We should not be quick to hurl such accusations at the political branches,” Alito said, referencing accusations of racism aimed at the state’s GOP leaders.
At issue is the district that GOP Rep. Nancy Mace now represents which state Republicans in the state capital in Columbia wanted to strengthen. According to Politico, the district began trending away from the Democrats since 2018, and after the 2020 Census, the state GOP moved to give Mace more security in her district.
Did the Supreme Court get this one right?
With the district already trending away from Democrats, state Republicans claim they intended to move to speed that shift with their new map. Their goal, they said, was purely political and had nothing at all to do with race.
Despite the lower court’s ruling that the map was discriminatory, the court also allowed the state to use the districting this year because it was too late to change things in time for the 2024 election. But now that ruling is nullified because the upper court found the lower court’s invalidation of the map to be incorrect.
Regardless, nothing was going to change for the 2024 election.
The South Carolina Republicans behind the map said that their sole goal was to increase Republican votes in the district they remapped, and that they had no intention of denuding minorities of any power. And while the high court agreed that there was no evidence that race formed the basis for the remapping, liberals disagreed that there was any distinction at all.
Liberal activists decried the distinction that the high court made in the case, saying that it will have a negative impact on other redistricting challenges.
“The bar keeps on getting moved, and it keeps getting harder and harder for plaintiffs to uproot racial discrimination,” said Leah Aden, a lawyer with the Legal Defense Fund civil rights group, according to NBC News
Left-wing Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan also blasted the majority decisions and stated it was a roadmap for race-based redistricting and biased elections.
“What a message to send to state legislators and mapmakers about racial gerrymandering,” she complained in her dissenting decision, adding that the decision tells politicians who “might want to straight-up suppress the electoral influence of minority voters” that they should just “Go right ahead.”
