Supreme Court rejects claim that South Carolina’s congressional map was racially gerrymandered

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a challenge to a South Carolina congressional redistricting plan that civil rights groups had described as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

In a 6-3 ruling divided along conservative-liberal lines, the high court said the challengers had failed to show that the state legislature was motivated by race when it moved thousands of Black voters out of the state’s 1st Congressional District. Instead, Justice Samuel Alito suggested in his majority opinion, the legislature was merely seeking to make the seat safer for Republicans — a goal that does not violate the Constitution.

The Charleston-area district had become a swing seat in the previous decade, changing parties in 2018 and 2020. GOP Rep. Nancy Mace now holds the seat.

After the 2020 census, the Republican-controlled state legislature drew new lines that moved many Black voters into the district long held by the prominent Black Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn.

The state branch of the NAACP challenged that map, accusing the legislature of intentionally sorting out Black voters from the district.

The NAACP argued that the division of Black voters made race a primary factor in drawing the lines, in violation of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and the 15th Amendment’s guarantee that Americans’ right to vote won’t be “denied or abridged” on account of race. A lower court sided with the NAACP — but that court put its own ruling on hold and allowed the state to use the legislature’s preferred map in the 2024 election because of the Supreme Court’s slow pace in reviewing the issue.

In the decision Thursday, the high court sided with the state — a decision previewed by oral arguments last fall, when the court’s conservative majority signaled it was not buying the challengers’ arguments.

Alito said the challengers failed to present sufficient evidence that the line-drawing at issue was driven by racial concerns rather than partisan ones. The justices ruled in 2019 that federal courts could not consider partisan gerrymandering claims.

“No direct evidence supports the District Court’s finding that race predominated in the design of District 1,” Alito wrote for the majority. “The circumstantial evidence falls far short of showing that race, not partisan preferences, drove the districting process.”

Writing in dissent for the court’s liberals, Justice Elena Kagan said Alito ignored obvious evidence that race was a significant factor in how the new map was drawn.

“The Challengers introduced more than enough evidence of racial gerrymandering to support the District Court’s judgment,” she wrote in an unusually blunt exchange with the court’s Republican-appointed justices. “The majority declares that it knows better than the District Court what happened in a South Carolina map-drawing room to produce District 1. 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.”

Alito’s opinion scoffed at Kagan’s dissent, even tweaking the liberals for its length, which came in roughly equal to the majority opinion at 35 pages.

“There is no substance to the dissent’s attacks,” he wrote.

Alito, who has been under fire in recent days over claims that the display of flags at his Virginia home and New Jersey shore house reflected bias and violated judicial ethics, delivered an unusually short, almost perfunctory summary of his opinion when the court announced its decisions from the bench Thursday morning.

Reporters in the court’s press room had only just begun to read the voting-rights ruling when he moved on to an unrelated, criminal-justice opinion he also wrote.

The high court’s ruling did not entirely foreclose the possibility that civil rights groups might eventually prevail in their challenge to the map on what Alito said was a distinct theory under the Voting Rights Act of diluting minority votes.

The majority ordered the case returned to the lower court for a fresh look at that issue by the panel that earlier ruled the map unconstitutional. All of those judges are Democratic appointees.

But with the state’s congressional primaries looming on June 11, and the lower court already having given the green light to use the legislature’s map this year, the chances of any changes in the map this year seem vanishingly remote.

The case out of South Carolina was unusual among those raising racial gerrymandering claims. The 1st District, both in its pre- and post-redistricting forms, was not approaching a majority Black district, a more legally significant threshold than when minority citizens make up only a smaller portion of a district’s population.

And most recent racial gerrymandering challenges have been argued under the Voting Rights Act, not constitutional claims.

Voting Rights Act challenges, generally, rely on claims of vote dilution — meaning minority voters broadly don’t have equal representation. These challenges often focus on trying to create (or protect) electoral districts where a majority of the voting-age population is not white.

Still, the ruling from the high court will likely make it easier for parties to draw more effective gerrymanders. GOP lawmakers insisted they ignored race and only considered partisanship when they drew a district that was more favorable to Republican candidates in South Carolina — and the high court’s ruling could give a green light for mapmakers to use partisan voting patterns as an effective proxy for race in some cases.