Supreme court rules South Carolina doesn’t need to redraw congressional map to consider Black voters

South Carolina Republicans do not need to redraw their congressional map, the US supreme court ruled on Thursday, saying that a lower court had not properly evaluated the evidence when it ruled that the lawmakers had discriminated against Black voters.

In a 6-3 decision, the justices sent the case back to the lower court for further consideration.

“A party challenging a map’s constitutionality must disentangle race and politics if it wishes to prove that the legislature was motivated by race as opposed to partisanship. Second, in assessing a legislature’s work, we start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” wrote Samuel Alito in an opinion that was joined by the court’s five other conservative justices.

“The three-judge district court paid only lip service to these propositions. That misguided approach infected the district court’s findings of fact, which were clearly erroneous under the appropriate legal standard.”

The dispute centered on the way the Republicans who control the state legislature redrew the state’s first congressional district after the 2020 census. After the representative Nancy Mace narrowly was elected in 2020, they shifted the district’s boundaries to make it much friendlier to Republicans. As part of that effort, they moved 30,000 Black voters from Mace’s first district to the sixth, currently represented by Jim Clyburn, a Black Democrat. A lower court had ruled that lawmakers had impermissibly relied on race to redraw the district and told lawmakers to redraw it.

The case had dragged on for so long, however, that the lower court and the supreme court recently allowed South Carolina to use the district for this year’s election.

The decision in Alexander v South Carolina Conference