The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the constitutionality of a South Carolina congressional map that a lower court had previously found diluted the power of Black voters. In a 6-3 decision authored by Justice Samuel Alito, the Court’s conservative supermajority wrote that “the Challengers provided no direct evidence of a racial gerrymander, and their circumstantial evidence is very weak.”
The court’s ruling protects the seat of GOP Rep. Nancy Mace, a onetime relative moderate who has veered sharply to the right after Republicans redrew her district following the 2020 census to make it more GOP-friendly. She was one of eight House Republicans who voted to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and she subsequently endorsed Donald Trump despite once saying that she held him responsible for the January 6 insurrection. Mace defeated Democrat Joe Cunningham by one point in 2020, but she won reelection in her redrawn Charleston-based district by 14 points in 2022.
A GOP state senator from the area said he wanted to “give the district a stronger Republican lean.” Republicans accomplished that goal by moving nearly 30,000 Black voters in Charleston County (62 percent of the county’s total Black population) from the swing 1st district to the safely Democratic seat of longtime Rep. James Clyburn, one of the most powerful House Democrats.
A federal court ruled in January 2023 that the map was a “stark racial gerrymander.” But the Supreme Court disagreed, finding that South Carolina Republicans were motivated by politics, not race, and “acted in good faith.” The SCOTUS justices rejected the factual findings of the lower court, which the high court is only supposed to do if the findings are clearly wrong. The court’s delay in issuing a ruling (civil rights groups had asked the justices to rule by the beginning of the year) already forced the lower court to allow the disputed map to stay in place for this election, handing Republicans another House seat for 2024.
