A lower court had ruled that the state’s Republican-drawn map was a racial gerrymander.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Wednesday appeared likely to uphold a Republican-drawn congressional district in South Carolina that a lower court found was racially gerrymandered.— tests the legal limits of partisan gerrymandering when it intersects with race. The NAACP is accusing Republican lawmakers of drawing the state’s 1st District, represented by GOP Rep. Nancy Mace, by shuffling Black voters in and out of the district to make it reliably Republican.
The case is the third time in two years that the nation’s top court has heard arguments about states’ congressional lines, once again putting the justices in the position of deciding political boundaries ahead of a big election. The country has a long history of racial gerrymandering, which federal courts still police.
earlier this year, writing that “race was the predominant factor motivating” the new 1st District and that there was an “effective bleaching of African American voters out of the Charleston County portion” of the district.Republicans appealed to the Supreme Court, conceding that— but for partisan, not racial, reasons.
The arguments on Wednesday were remarkable in the fact that nobody — not the attorneys for the state of South Carolina, the NAACP or the Justice Department, nor the justices themselves — questioned what the goal of the South Carolina congressional map was: to give Republicans an advantage in the 1st District. The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that partisan gerrymandering was.
“Everybody can tell you that if you really want to draw a stable partisan gerrymander, you do not rely on a single presidential year election data,” she said. “They had not only the opportunity — it was sitting there on their computers — but the clear incentive to be looking at this race data, which is certainly more predictive of future voting behavior than a single presidential year election, in which President Trump was the candidate, which further distorts voting behavior.
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