In January, a unanimous three judge panel struck down a Republican-drawn South Carolina congressional map for discriminating against Black voters. But the Supreme Court may be coming to the GOP’s rescue.
On Monday, the high court said it’s going to hear an appeal from South Carolina Republicans in the racial gerrymandering case, in what could become the 6-3 GOP supermajority’s next attack on democracy.
After the 2020 census, Republicans redrew the map and, under that new map, Mace won by a wider margin in 2022.
The congressional district in question — the 1st, long anchored in Charleston County — is currently held by Republican Rep. Nancy Mace, who my colleague Ja’han Jones recently described as “two-faced.” Democrat Joe Cunningham won the district in a 2018 upset, before barely losing to Mace in 2020. After the 2020 census, Republicans redrew the map and, under that new map, Mace won by a wider margin in 2022.
But that three-judge panel ruled in January that the redrawn map was an illegal racial gerrymander that pushed Black people out of the district for predominantly racial reasons. “The movement of over 30,000 African Americans in a single county from Congressional District No. 1 to Congressional District No. 6 created a stark racial gerrymander of Charleston County,” the panel wrote. The 6th District has long been held by Democratic Rep. James Clyburn.
The Roberts Court has steadily handed down anti-democratic voting rulings over the years. The Roberts Court has steadily handed down anti-democratic voting rulings over the years. And it’s in the process of deciding a crucial appeal that could further hobble the Voting Rights Act in an Alabama case, with a ruling expected by late June. This new case, Alexander v. South Carolina Conference of the NAACP, will likely be argued toward the beginning of next term, in the fall. The Alexander in the case name is Thomas Alexander, the Republican president of the state senate. So, what do South Carolina Republicans plan to argue in front of the Supreme Court? Basically, that the judges on the lower-court panel — all Democratic appointees — were too mean when they probed GOP motives. That is, the judges assumed they acted in bad faith. These Republicans claim that their motivations were political, not racial. Ah, okay then. As farcical as the politics/race ruse is, it may carry the day at the Roberts Court, which has been treating the Constitution as “colorblind” while helping Republicans achieve outcomes that are anything but.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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