The US Supreme Court heard a case touching on the thorny issues of race and politics on Wednesday that could help determine whether Democrats or Republicans will control the House of Representatives next year.
The high-stakes case before the nation’s highest court involves a challenge to a congressional district map drawn up by the Republican-majority legislature in South Carolina.
It is one of several legal battles involving alleged racial gerrymandering — the manipulation of electoral maps that dilutes the voting power of minorities — winding their way through US courts.
In the South Carolina case, a three-judge panel ruled unanimously in January that a congressional district redrawn after the 2020 census was an illegal racial gerrymander and ordered it to be reconfigured before the November 2024 election.
The redrawn congressional map moved 60 percent of the Black residents of the coastal city of Charleston — nearly 30,000 people — from one district into another which already had a Black majority.
Six of the current House members from South Carolina are white and one is Black.
The South Carolina legislature challenged the district court’s ruling and appeared to get a sympathetic hearing on Wednesday from the conservative justices on the Supreme Court, who hold a 6-3 majority.
“Disentangling race and politics, in a situation like this, is very, very difficult,” said Chief Justice John Roberts, adding that much of the evidence that race was used as a factor in creating the district map was “circumstantial.”
John Gore, representing the South Carolina Senate, said the legislature, relying on data from the 2020 presidential election, had pursued the legally permissible objective of increasing the Republican Party’s vote share in drawing the map but had not engaged in racial gerrymandering.
“It achieved that goal by moving Republicans into the district and Democrats out of the district,” Gore said. “All of the direct evidence confirms that it used political data, not racial data, to identify Republicans and Democrats.”
Leah Aden, an attorney for the NAACP, the civil rights group which brought the original case, dismissed Gore’s claim, saying “all the evidence reflects that they were looking at race.”
“Black Democrat voters were significantly and disproportionately targeted for movement,” Aden said. “It’s only Black people in the design of this district that were treated with racial stereotyping, which is offensive to the Constitution.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch, a conservative, noted that the court generally operates under the presumption that a legislature is acting in “good faith,” saying “there’s no evidence that the legislature could have achieved its partisan tilt, which everyone says is permissible, in any other way.”
The South Carolina case is one of a number of congressional redistricting cases being fought in the courts following the 2020 census. A panel of federal judges approved a new congressional map for the southern state of Alabama this month that includes a second electoral district with a large population of African Americans, who tend to vote Democratic.
Black voters represent around a quarter of registered voters in Alabama but are in a majority in only one of the state’s seven US House districts.
The new map was drawn up after the Supreme Court ruled in June that the redistricting plan adopted by Alabama for the 2022 congressional elections violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was passed by Congress during the civil rights movement to prevent racial discrimination at the polls.
Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, both conservatives, joined the three liberal justices to fashion the 5-4 majority in the Alabama case.
A congressional map in Louisiana is also facing a legal challenge on the grounds it results in just one Black-majority district although African Americans make up 30 percent of the southern state’s population.
Republicans currently hold a slim 221-212 majority in the House and an increase in the number of Black-majority districts could tip the balance in next year’s congressional elections, when all 435 House seats will be up for grabs.
The Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling in the South Carolina case by January. – Selim Saheb Ettaba and Chris Lefkow
