The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a state's mapmakers can move tens of thousands of black voters to a different district if they seek to shore up a partisan advantage for a Republican candidate.
In a 6-3 decision, the justices upheld a redistricting map drawn by South Carolina's Republican Legislature and overturned a lower court ruling that called it “absurd racial gerrymandering.”
The question was whether state lawmakers drew the districts for political or racial reasons.
The six Republican appointees were in the majority and said lawmakers were motivated by partisan concerns, while the three Democratic appointees disagreed and said voters changed based on their race.
In the past, the court had said that partisan gerrymandering is legal and as old as the nation, but racial gerrymandering is discriminatory and unconstitutional.
The justices reasoned that the Constitution allows elected officials to make decisions based on political considerations, but the 14th Amendment prohibits the government from making decisions based on race.
However, it is not surprising that those two principles conflict when drawing electoral districts in areas where black voters overwhelmingly support Democrats.
The South Carolina case centered on a Charleston-area congressional district held by Republican Rep. Nancy Mace.
That district had regularly elected Republicans, but a Democrat won it in 2018 in what was described as a major upset. Mace raced in 2020 and took a narrow victory.
When the South Carolina Legislature redrawn its seven districts in response to the 2020 Census, cartographers sought to shore up their district as a Republican stronghold. They moved more than 30,000 black voters from Mace's district in Charleston to a majority-black district controlled by Rep. James E. Clyburn, the state's only Democrat.
Lawyers from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the ACLU sued and argued that the state's redistricting plan was unconstitutional. They won a ruling from a three-judge court that said “race was the predominant motivating factor” in Mace's drawing of the district.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr, speaking for the court, said the evidence showed that partisan motives were the driving force.
“The Constitution entrusts state legislatures with the primary responsibility for drawing electoral districts, and redistricting is an inescapably political enterprise. … A legislature can pursue partisan ends when it engages in redistricting,” he said.
“To separate race from other permissible considerations, we require the plaintiff to demonstrate that race was the predominant factor motivating the legislature's decision to place a significant number of voters inside or outside a particular district.”
South Carolina mapmakers analyzed election data as well as racial data, Alito said, and concluded that the plaintiffs did not demonstrate that race was the dominant factor in drawing the districts. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett agreed.
Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
“What a message to send to state legislators and cartographers about racial gerrymandering,” Kagan said in dissent. “Go ahead, this court says to the states today. … Especially in the electoral sphere, where horrific patterns of widespread racial discrimination have ruled for so long, we should demand better, from ourselves, from our political representatives and, above all, from this court.”
Civil rights lawyers who brought the case said the justices should have deferred to the three-judge court that held a nine-day trial in the South Carolina case and closely examined the evidence of how the districts were redrawn.
“Our nation’s highest court gave the green light to racial discrimination in South Carolina’s redistricting process, denying Black voters the right to be free from race-based classification, and sending a message that the facts, the process and the precedents will not protect the Black vote,” said Janai Nelson, president and chief counsel of the Legal Defense Fund.
Unlike other redistricting cases in Alabama and Louisiana, the immediate impact of the South Carolina case appears to be limited.
Civil rights lawsuits in Alabama and Louisiana led to the creation of a majority-black second district where a Democrat could be elected. The South Carolina litigation did not involve a potential majority-black second district.
In March, the three judges who had overturned Mace's district issued an order allowing this year's election to be held using the state's preferred map.
