The Supreme Court is to hear an appeal by South Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature in a dispute over a congressional map which was discarded earlier this year by a federal court. The case pivots around the accusation of racial gerrymandering, with the GOP lawmakers rejecting allegations of rearranging voting boundaries based on race and maintaining they were simply securing safe Republican areas according to SCOTUSblog.
The lawmakers have also issued a plea to the justices to quash the lower court’s decision to allow the reinstatement of the original congressional map. They believe that courts must distinguish between race and politics in order to avoid interjecting themselves in political disputes under the pretense of supporting the Constitution’s ban on racial gerrymandering.
The counter-argument from the opposing side is that the lower court precisely followed the Supreme Court’s precedents declaring it unconstitutional to use race as the primary factor to sort voters, even for partisan objectives. They insist that a victory for the GOP lawmakers would endorse the screen of political bias over racial motivations in drawing maps, and frustrate efforts of contestation by state legislatures.
The case is rooted in the South Carolina legislature’s 2021 adoption of a new map for the state’s seven seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. The revised boundaries shifted almost two-thirds of the Black voters in Charleston County from District 1, held by Republican Nancy Mace, into the Democrat Jim Clyburn’s District 6, while also relocating Republican regions in nearby Beaufort, Berkeley, and Dorchester Counties from District 6 into District 1.
The lawsuit argues that these changes were products of racial gerrymandering and therefore unconstitutional, with the claimants including Taiwan Scott, a Black voter residing in District 1, and the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP. However, the Republicans, along with state election officials, argue that these changes were based on partisanship, not race and they used election data for mapmaking rather than racial demographic data.
Both the sides now await the Supreme Court’s decision, which they hope to be delivered by January 1, 2024, providing adequate time for the state to prepare for the 2024 election cycle.