Clarence Thomas wants the Supreme Court to stop hearing cases on racist redistricting

The US Supreme Court has overturned a lower court’s decision that found South Carolina’s congressional maps were unconstitutionally gerrymandered to discriminate against Black voters.

The high court’s 6-3 decision on Thursday effectively gives state lawmakers a roadmap for discriminating against Black voters when drafting congressional district boundaries, as long as they can say they were targeting their party affiliation, not their race.

Writing alone in a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas appeared to argue that the nation’s high court should not be policing racial gerrymandering at all, going so far as to criticize the court’s decision in a landmark case ending segregation in the US as “extravagant.”

In its monumental 1954 decision in Brown v Board of Education, the Supreme Court sought a “boundless view of equitable remedies” through “extravagant uses of judicial power” to end racist segregation, according to Justice Thomas.

He said he wrote separately to address whether established voting rights are “faithful” to the US Constitution. “In my view, the Court has no power to decide these types of claims,” he wrote.

“Drawing political districts is a task for politicians, not federal judges,” arguing that the court’s “insistence” on hearing cases involving racist voter suppression “led it to develop doctrines that indulge in race-based reasoning inimical to the Constitution.”

He argued that the court should “abandon” these kinds of cases and “leave redistricting to politicians.”

Last year, a federal court tossed out South Carolina’s map after finding that the state’s First Congressional District – currently represented by Republican US Rep Nancy Mace – violated the Constitution by using race as the determining