Kagan Gives Fiery Dissent On SCOTUS Ruling Allowing Racial Gerrymandering

The decision by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority Thursday to allowSouth Carolina to proceed with its gerrymandered map led to a blistering dissent by Justice Elena Kagan, who argued that the new map was designed to weakens Black voters’ influence.

The 6-3 ruling, led by conservative Justice Samuel Alito, overturns a lower court decision made last year that concluded Republicans in South Carolina had illegally used race to gerrymander the state’s 1st Congressional District. In ordering the state legislature to redraw its map, the three-judge federal district court panel said that the GOP’s attempt to move Black voters out of the district and white voters in amounted to a “bleaching” of the district.

By reversing the lower court’s decision, Kagan said that the Supreme Court’s majority “goes seriously wrong.”

“The proper response to this case is not to throw up novel roadblocks enabling South Carolina to continue dividing citizens along racial lines,” the liberal justice wrote. “It is to respect the plausible — no, the more than plausible — findings of the District Court that the State engaged in race-based districting. And to tell the State that it must redraw District 1, this time without targeting African-American citizens.”

South Carolina’s decision to move 60% of Charleston County’s Black residents from the 1st Congressional District’s Charleston County into its 6th Congressional District was, Alito said, motivated by politics rather than race. The complaint brought by the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP relied on “circumstantial” evidence to argue the maps were racially gerrymandered on purpose, he wrote.

But Kagan refused to believe that the South Carolina GOP’s map’s impact on Black voters