Supreme Court sides with Republicans over South Carolina voting map

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court cleared the way Thursday for South Carolina to keep using a congressional map that a lower court had deemed an unconstitutional racial gerrymander that resulted in the “bleaching of African American voters” from a district.

The conservative majority, by a 6-3 vote, returned the case to the lower court, handing a victory to Republicans by allowing them to maintain boundaries that helped make the district in question a party stronghold.

The immediate effect of the ruling will be limited, as the court’s delay in ruling had already ensured that this year’s elections would take place under the contested map. But the majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, will have an impact beyond South Carolina in the years to come, said Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at UCLA.

“Justice Alito for a court majority has once again come up with a legal framework that makes it easier for Republican states to engage in redistricting to help white Republicans maximize their political power,” Hasen said.

The ruling was the latest in a series of closely divided decisions on elections that are a distinctive element of the work of the court led by Chief Justice John Roberts.

The trend is not entirely uniform, as the court ruled last year that Alabama lawmakers had diluted the power of Black voters in drawing a congressional voting map. But the overall pattern has been to limit the oversight of elections by Congress and the federal courts, often in ways that have benefited Republicans.

In the case decided Thursday, Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, No. 22-807, the court’s majority held that courts must generally credit lawmakers’ assertions that their goal in redistricting was partisan, which is permissible, rather than based on race, which is not. “We start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” Alito wrote.

Quoting earlier decisions, he wrote that courts should avoid grave accusations against state lawmakers.

“When a federal court finds that race drove a legislature’s districting decisions,” he wrote, “it is declaring that the legislature engaged in ‘offensive and demeaning’ conduct that ‘bears an uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid.’ We should not be quick to hurl such accusations at the political branches.”

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan accused the majority of erecting hurdles to make it all but impossible to challenge voting maps as racial gerrymanders.

Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joined Alito’s majority opinion.

In a concurring opinion, Thomas said he would have gone further, getting out of the business of assessing claims of racial gerrymandering entirely.