The Supreme Court upheld Republican-backed electoral maps in South Carolina in a 6-3 decision on Thursday, arguing that those suing to overturn the maps had not proven they were racially drawn.
A lower United States district court previously ruled that maps approved by the Republican-controlled South Carolina legislature were unconstitutional after they were challenged by a chapter of the NAACP and the ACLU. The majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, said that the district court had ruled wrongly and that the maps could stand.
“When partisanship and race correlate, it naturally follows that a map that has been gerrymandered to achieve a partisan end can look very similar to a racially gerrymandered map,” Alito wrote. “In other words, the plaintiffs failed to meet the high bar for a racial-gerrymandering claim by failing to produce, among other things, an alternative map showing that a rational legislature sincerely driven by its professed partisan goals would have drawn a different map with greater racial balance.”
Alito’s decision was joined by Justices John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barret, and Brett Kavanugh, with Clarence Thomas adding a concurring opinion.
Thomas wrote that the court had no authority to be intervening in disputes over electoral districts.
“In my view, the Court has no power to decide these types of claims,” he wrote in his concurrence. “Drawing political districts is a task for politicians, not federal judges. There are no judicially manageable standards for resolving claims about districting, and, regardless, the Constitution commits those issues exclusively to the political branches.”
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The liberal wing of the court, including Justice Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, said they agreed with the lower court in their dissent and said that it was “more than plausible” that South Carolina had done race-based districting.
“In every way, the majority today stacks the deck against the Challengers. They must lose, the majority says, because the State had a ‘possible’ story to tell about not considering race — even if the opposite story was the more credible,” they wrote.
The challenged map was already slated to be used for the 2024 election due to the ongoing court deliberations over the case.
