Supreme Court protects GOP gerrymanders by sabotaging Black voters' rights

The Supreme Court's right-wing majority upheld South Carolina's congressional map in a 6-3 decision along ideological lines issued Thursday, reversing a lower court ruling that found Republicans had violated the Constitution by racially gerrymandering the 1st District to protect Rep. Nancy Mace, a white Republican. The majority ruled that politics—not race—was the predominant factor in the GOP's gerrymander, which shifted Black voters from the 1st District to the neighboring 6th to ensure conservative white voters would still dominate in the 1st. This latest decision all but eliminates one of the few remaining tools that voters of color had left to challenge racism in redistricting. Because the court's Republican-appointed majority ruled in 2019 that federal courts cannot adjudicate partisan gerrymandering challenges, allowing Republican mapmakers to claim partisan motives as a defense against racial gerrymandering only entrenches both kinds of gerrymanders. Last year, a federal district court struck down the 1st District, ruling that Republicans had intentionally discriminated against Black voters. The three-judge panel concluded that legislators had violated the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause by packing too many Black voters into the 6th District, illegally letting race predominate in the mapmaking process in the absence of any compelling government interest to do so. As shown on this map, the 1st District includes parts of the Charleston area and coastal South Carolina (click here for an interactive version). It saw multiple competitive elections under the previous decade's map: Democrat Joe Cunningham won a 51-49 upset in 2018 before losing by that same margin to Mace in 2020. However, the GOP's new gerrymander, passed after the most recent census in 2020, insulated Mace from future challenges by extending Donald Trump's margin of victory from 52-46 to 53-45. Mace, in part thanks to this new map, comfortably won reelection 56-42 last year. Republicans took advantage of the fact that voting patterns in much of the South are heavily polarized along racial lines: Black voters overwhelmingly prefer Democrats and white voters heavily favor Republicans. Mapmakers looking to protect Mace therefore moved Black voters from her district into the 6th, a dark blue seat that already had a Black majority and has long elected Rep. Jim Clyburn, a Black Democrat. But the Supreme Court, in an opinion authored by far-right Justice Samuel Alito, rejected as "clearly erroneous" the district court's determination that race had illegally predominated, departing from a longstanding norm of deference towards findings of fact by trial courts. In doing so, Alito significantly increased the burden on plaintiffs to prove claims of illegal racial gerrymandering by holding that legislators draw maps with a "presumption" of "good faith." Absent "smoking gun" evidence of intentional discrimination, as election law expert Rick Hasen put it, Alito's decision will require plaintiffs to produce an alternative map to show how mapmakers could achieve their partisan ends without illegally relying on race. This new requirement, found nowhere in legal precedent, consequently puts the burden on plaintiffs to help draw a new gerrymander for state officials, all but negating the purpose of filing a lawsuit in the first place. Not only will this ruling undermine the cause of Black representation in South Carolina, it will likely reverberate far beyond the state. Alito's decision will blunt the ability of racial gerrymandering lawsuits to have a significant partisan impact, and because race and party are so heavily intertwined in the South, it diminishes the likelihood of increased representation for voters of color throughout the region.