The NAACP had argued that the state unconstitutionally moved Black voters out of Rep. Nancy Mace’s district.
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.
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. In the decision Thursday, the high court sided with the state — a decision previewed by oral arguments last fall, whenAlito 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.
“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.
The majority ordered the case returned to the lower court for a fresh look at that issue by the panel that earlierBut 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.
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