Supreme Court Upholds South Carolina Voting Map as Constitutional
Alito: “They [the challengers] provided no direct evidence of a racial gerrymander, and their circumstantial evidence is very weak.”
The Supreme Court upheld the GOP-drawn South Carolina voting map as constitutional by a 6-3 vote.
The ACLU and NCAAP claimed the GOP illegally redrew the voting map after 2020.
A district court overturned the South Carolina map, claiming the 1st Congressional District “was an unlawful gerrymander” because the Republicans “shifted about 30,000 Black voters from Charleston County over to the state’s 6th Congressional District, which became more solidly Democratic than it was before.”
Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) holds the 6th Congressional District.
South Carolina already held its presidential primary. The state has June primaries, though, and early voting begins for that begins on May 28.
The map is important:
All seven of South Carolina’s seats in the U.S. House of Representatives are up for election in 2024.
All 170 seats in the South Carolina state legislature — 124 in the House and 46 in the Senate — are also up for grabs this year. But, not every race features a contested primary.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote:
They [the challengers] provided no direct evidence of a racial gerrymander, and their circumstantial evidence is very weak. Instead, the Challengers relied on deeply flawed expert reports. And while these experts produced tens of thousands of maps with differently configured districts, they did not offer a single map that achieved the legislature’s partisan goal while including a higher BVAP in District 1. Faced with this record, we must reverse the District Court on the racial-gerrymandering claim.
Justice Clarence Thomas sided with the majority, but did not agree with Part III-C. Thomas does not think SCOTUS has the power to decide the two claims listed in that part: a “racially-gerrymandering” claim and a “vote dilution” claim.
“Drawing political districts is a task for politicians, not federal judges,” Thomas argued. “There are no judicially manageable standards for resolving claims about districting, and, regardless, the Constitution commits those issues exclusively to the political branches.”
Thomas has an interesting view regarding the Court’s approach to these cases, telling his colleagues to take the bait when they participate. He brings up a familiar recent case:
The Court’s insistence on adjudicating these claims has led it to develop doctrines that indulge in race-based reasoning inimical to the Constitution. As we reiterated last Term, “‘[o]ur Constitution is color-blind.’” Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and= Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U. S. 181, 230 (2023) (quoting Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U. S. 537, 559 (1896) (Harlan, J., dissenting)). A colorblind Constitution does not require that racial considerations “predominate” before subjecting them to scrutiny. Nor does it tolerate groupwide judgments about the preferences and beliefs of racial minorities. It behooves us to abandon our misguided efforts and leave districting to politicians.
The three liberal justices dissented. Justice Elena Kagan wrote:
In every way, the majority today stacks the deck against the Challengers. They must lose, the majority says, because the State had a “possible” story to tell about not considering race—even if the opposite story was the more credible. Ante, at 16. And they must lose again, the majority says, because they failed to offer a particular form of proof— which they did not know would be relevant and which this Court recently told plaintiffs was not required.
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Comments
Why are they wasting time on this when unconstitutional ballot measures, unpurged voter rolls and fraudulent collection of ballots is still occurring?
I am glad the Republicans won though. I am sure what the leftists wanted WAS a racial gerrymander, under their direction.
This wasn’t a fight they chose, they were defending against leftists trying to make the map more unfair.
because they failed to offer a particular form of proof— which they did not know would be relevant and which this Court recently told plaintiffs was not required
Unusual for the writers here to leave us hanging on this. What sort of proof is it that the court recently said wasn’t required? Why not complete the thought and rebut that, instead of leaving the article without answering?
(No, I am not going to slog through the actual opinions/dissents to find it out.)
Me neither. I believe that Justice Kagan is comparing this SC map/trial record to that of the Alabama case/record where the plaintiffs prevailed in getting a second ‘majority minority’ CD implemented. Here the plaintiffs argument was basically that moving the 30K ‘black’ voters from one CD to another was a dilution of political power of those ‘black’ voters b/c they were jammed into an existing minority/majority CD. Leaving them in place and/or adding additional ‘black’ voters to the original CD would (by plaintiffs logic) have held steady or increased their political power by making the CD more competitive and thus the votes of the 30K ‘black’ voters more valuable.
Normally, or at least lately the d/prog have stayed away from this argument b/c the CT isn’t gonna rule on a directly political question, they will dodge by defer to legislature and b/c a precedent on ‘dilution’ works against them when the group alleging dilution becomes ‘Citizens’. In some States , particularly in the West, there are some CD with more than 3x the number of eligible voters than other CD in the same State due to illegal aliens. The d/prog really don’t want to face a CT ready to tackle dilution arguments. One potential outcome would be apportionment of CD AMONG the States goes as now but the Maps of the CD WITHIN the State must have a roughly equal # of Citizens in addition to current factors.
Agree. I thought “dilution” was the official policy of the Ds, to dilute citizens by flooding the country with non-citizens and allowing them to vote.
Of course, the actual answer to racial bias in districting is to use geometry instead of emotion.
Make every district equal in size and shape; some will be lean to one side, some to another, but bias of any kind becomes moot.
The problem is the people don’t live in any sort of easily definable shapes. They don’t conform to geometry. It would be a nice try to conform it to streets or something.
Minor jigs and jogs in a map are unimportant, so long as the mass of the district conforms to geometric rules rather than racial ones.
The rules ideally require districts to have equal populations. Trying to shape a map through big blue cities is like trying to plot a course through a swarm of black holes.
A circumference:area ratio law would eliminate the octopi districts and make every district a rounded rectangle. Neither party wants that law in their state because both parties want to Gerrymander.
It’s obviously a job for … AI !!!
HA!
Just like historical figures…. AI will turn white districts black…..
like executive orders the gerrymandering is an in your face act
the solutions are easy
no eo allowed and divide the states up on an actual pie sliced cant be changed system
100% of the most gerrymandered Districts, nationwide, were gerrymandered entirely on RACE.
These are the VRA Districts that unconstitutionally rig elections for Democrats.
State Legislatures have sole Constitutional authority to draw District lines, subject only to the simple rules that they must be contiguous and must contain approximately the same number of voters (give or take a few %).
Governors don’t sign off on these, and can’t veto.
So, where did Congress get the authority to require racially gerrymandered Districts by Federal Law? Where did State and Federal Courts get the authority to weigh in on these?
Absolute garbage, legally, and even worse from a policy perspective.
The propaganda supporting this is even more absurd: By far the most racist District lines are presumed to be the only ones that are not racist – because they’re packed full of blacks or hispanics.
What they’ve done is make it illegal, at both the State and Federal level, to draw Districts that ignore race. They are REQUIRED to racially gerrymander a set number of Districts – some for blacks, others for hispanics, and this has spread to States that had no history of Democrats preventing blacks from voting.
Mostly correct. The CD are apportioned among the States based upon the number of residents not number of voters. There is a huge imbalance among CD in the number of eligible voters each contains. In general a CD map should be drawn to maximize compactness, be contiguous, follow political boundaries such as County and Municipal boundaries, use geographic boundaries such as rivers/mountains that may delineate different sorts of communities and finally end up with roughly equal numbers of RESIDENTS.
IMO the States are in a catch 22 b/c they are prohibited from using race to draw boundaries but also face challenges to their CD maps when the results don’t satisfy race hustlers in creating ‘enough’ minority majority CD. The CTs have, as a practical matter, allowed race to be used as a proxy for political purposes by assuming that ‘black/latino’ residents have a set of distinct things that require creating and maintaining special carve out ‘minority/majority CD. That if these don’t exist in sufficient# that is evidence of racial oppression and discrimination. I suspect that as the ‘latino’ voters and to a lesser extent ‘black’ voters continue to shift away from lockstep d/prog political support that the appetite for these CD will diminish. That’s not even getting into the inter party d/prog scuffles between the various race based grievance groups over their slice of political power. Nor does it address the bizarre logic used; if a State has eight CD and ‘black population of 25% then the State must have 2/8 CD drawn as black minority/majority CD. Ok now what about LGBT? Why don’t they get a CD drawn if the reported census count is 1/8 (12.5%)? What about every other group we can artificially create based on immutable characteristics? Shouldn’t there be female and male CD? Why not when each has distinct issues requiring special circumstances? See Title 9.
This crap is way overdue to be destroyed. We shouldn’t have ever gotten into buying the notions of tribalism or focusing on differences among us to create and perpetuate that. We should have demanded each eligible voter have an equal amount of political power via their vote by instead creating CD with equal numbers of Citizens.
the inter party d/prog scuffles
“intra party”
Some excellent comments.
Thanks. The dog and cat both decided I needed to be up today at 05:00 for some reason and hadn’t had enough covfefe to catch my error.
Covfefe was a typo of “coverage”, not “coffee”.
Libtards were too effing STUPID to note the context.
Aarradin,
I was trying to make a multi layer joke by using Coveffe in place of coffee. 1st as subtle jab at GWB ‘see I made another error’ and the its use in place place of coffee which as you point really means ‘coverage’. thus also mocking d/prog true believers. Apparently it fell flat which is ok b/c I have no interest in a comedy career.