In a major win for Republicans, the Supreme Court on Thursday rejected claims that a congressional district in South Carolina was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, clearing the way for the GOP-drawn map to remain in effect.
The 6-3 ruling, with the court’s conservative justices in the majority, reinstates the Republican-friendly district lines and deals a blow to Democrats and civil rights groups who had challenged the map as improperly sorting voters based on race.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said the challengers had failed to show that race was the primary factor behind the district’s boundaries, rather than partisan politics. He established a demanding new legal test that will make it extremely difficult for plaintiffs to prevail in future racial gerrymandering cases.
“Inferring bad faith based on the racial effects of a political gerrymander in a jurisdiction where race and partisan preference are closely correlated would circumvent our decision” barring federal court consideration of partisan gerrymandering claims, Alito wrote.
The ruling is a major victory for South Carolina’s Republican legislature, which approved the new congressional map in 2021 after the latest census data was released. The map reconfigured the state’s 1st Congressional District, moving nearly two-thirds of Black voters out of the coastal district represented by Republican Nancy Mace.
Republicans openly acknowledged their aim was to shore up the 1st District as a safe GOP seat after Democrat Joe Cunningham pulled an upset win there in 2018 before losing to Mace in 2020. By moving more Republican-friendly suburban and rural areas into the district, the map made it even more difficult for Democrats to compete.
A federal district court had struck down the map, finding it was motivated primarily by a “discriminatory purpose” to dilute the power of Black voters. But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority firmly rejected that conclusion, faulting the lower court for failing to properly disentangle racial and partisan motives.
Alito stressed that any time race and party affiliation correlate, as they do in South Carolina where over 90% of Black voters are Democrats, plaintiffs face an “extraordinarily heavy” burden to show race was the predominant factor driving redistricting decisions.
Crucially, Alito said plaintiffs should have offered up an alternative map proving the legislature could have achieved its partisan goals without diminishing minority influence. Their failure to do so, he wrote, made it “difficult for plaintiffs to defeat our starting presumption that the legislature acted in good faith.”
That language amounts to a strong pro-legislator presumption that will be enormously favorable to states defending future redistricting lawsuits alleging racial bias, according to legal experts.
In dissent, the court’s three liberal justices accused the majority of unfairly tilting the evidentiary requirements and rewriting legal standards to make racial gerrymandering claims nearly impossible to win.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the decision tells legislatures aiming to “suppress the electoral influence of minority voters” that they can simply invoke some other goal like partisan advantage to avoid meaningful judicial scrutiny.
“Perhaps most dispiriting is what lies behind the Court’s new approach — its special rules to specially disadvantage suits to remedy race-based redistricting,” Kagan said.
The court did leave open one narrow path for the challengers, sending the case back to reconsider whether the new map illegally dilutes the overall voting power of Black voters in South Carolina.
But realistically, Thursday’s ruling seems to secure the Republican-drawn boundaries for the 2024 elections at least. And it establishes formidable new barriers for those alleging maps were drawn to discriminate against minority voters on the basis of race. As a result of the ruling, Republicans now hold a dominant 6-1 advantage in South Carolina’s congressional delegation.