The U.S. Supreme Court handed South Carolina Republicans a victory Thursday, ruling against a challenge to an electoral map they devised that removed 30,000 black residents from a congressional district.
The justices, in a 6-3 decision, with conservative justices in the majority and liberal justices dissenting, overturned a lower court’s ruling that the map drawn by Republicans violated the rights of black voters under the 14th Amendment. of the United States Constitution, which guarantees equal protection under the law. The ruling was written by conservative Justice Samuel Alito.
On March 28, the lower court, because of the time it took the Supreme Court to act, decided that the disputed map can be used in this year’s congressional elections, a ruling that could undermine Democrats’ chances of winning control. of the United States House of Representatives.
On Thursday, the conservative majority sided with South Carolina Republicans, who argued that the first congressional district map was drawn to ensure a partisan advantage, a practice that the Supreme Court decided in 2019 was not reviewable by the federal courts, unlike map drawing that is primarily motivated by race, which remains illegal.
The majority found that the civil rights group NAACP and black voters who challenged the map failed to demonstrate that the map’s design was primarily motivated by race.
This case was being closely watched ahead of the US elections on November 5 in which the presidency and control of both houses of Congress will be decided. Democrats lost their majority in the 435-seat House in the 2022 election and hope to overtake the slim Republican majority this year, with each competitive district crucial to the outcome. Republicans have a 217-213 margin in the House.
Ongoing legal battles over redistricting in several other states could be enough to determine House control in elections.
South Carolina’s legal fight centered on a map adopted in 2022 by the Republican-led state legislature that redrawn the boundaries of one of the state’s seven U.S. House districts, one that includes parts of Charleston along the Atlantic coast.
Alito wrote that “no direct evidence supports the district court’s conclusion that race predominated in the design of District 1” and that “the circumstantial evidence falls far short of demonstrating that race, and not partisan preferences, drove the process.” division of districts”.
In January 2023, a three-judge federal panel ruled that the map illegally classified voters by race and deliberately divided black neighborhoods in Charleston County in “crude racial gerrymandering.”
Gerrymandering is a practice that involves manipulating the geographic boundaries of electoral districts to marginalize a certain group of voters and increase the influence of others. In this case, the state legislature was accused of racial gerrymandering to reduce the influence of black voters, who tend to favor Democratic candidates.
Legislative district boundaries across the country are redrawn to reflect population changes as measured by the census conducted by the U.S. government each decade. In most states, redistricting is done by the party in power.
The new map in South Carolina increased the district’s share of white voters while reducing its share of black voters, which the lower court called “whitewashing.”
The map moved 30,000 black residents who had been in the 1st Congressional District to the neighboring 6th Congressional District, which extends 200 miles inland from Charleston. These voters were illegally “exiled,” the three-judge panel wrote.
The 6th District has been held for three decades by Democrat Jim Clyburn, one of the most prominent black members of Congress. Clyburn’s is the only one of South Carolina’s House districts held by a Democrat.
With the district’s previous boundaries in place, Republican Nancy Mace narrowly defeated an incumbent Democrat in 2020, by just over 1 percentage point, or 5,400 votes. With redistricting, Mace won re-election in 2022 by 14 percentage points.
The Supreme Court heard arguments in the case in October. The disputing parties had asked the Supreme Court to decide the case before the end of 2023.
In a separate ruling on redistricting, the Supreme Court on May 15 restored a newly drawn Louisiana electoral map that includes two majority-Black U.S. House districts, instead of the one present in an earlier version. The justices temporarily stayed a lower court’s decision to throw out the new map, allowing it to be used in this year’s elections.
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