Global Courant 2023-05-16 00:31:35
The case revolves around the allegation that Republican lawmakers in South Carolina drew district maps to dilute the share of the black vote.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday approved a bid by South Carolina officials to revive a Republican-manufactured voting card that a lower court said had unconstitutionally “banned” 30,000 black voters from a closely contested congressional district.
The judges appealed by South Carolina officials against a federal judicial panel’s ruling that found the map drawn by the Republicans had intentionally broken up black neighborhoods in Charleston County into a “stark racial gerrymander” and ordered the district to redraw .
Gerrymandering is a practice of manipulating constituency boundaries to marginalize a particular group of voters and increase the influence of others. In this case, Republican lawmakers were accused of racial gerrymandering to reduce black voter influence.
Legislative districts in the United States are redrawn to reflect population changes documented in the nationwide census conducted by the federal government each decade. The Republican-controlled South Carolina legislature passed a new voting card last year following the 2020 U.S. Census.
In a major blow to electoral reformers, the Supreme Court in 2019 rejected efforts to rein in gerrymandering made for partisan benefits, finding that federal judges lack the authority to curb the practice. Alleged race-based gerrymandering can be challenged in federal courts, but the Supreme Court, which has a conservative majority, has rolled back protections over the past decade.
In the case of South Carolina, the map in question set new boundaries for the state’s 1st Congressional District, which had consistently elected a Republican to the House for nearly four decades until 2018, when a Democrat won what was widely seen as an upset victory . In 2020, Republican Nancy Mace won the district by just over a percentage point.
In redrawing the district last year, Republicans relocated more than 30,000 black Charleston County residents to the neighboring Black 6th Congressional District, which has been represented in the House for more than 30 years by Representative James Clyburn, a black Democratic legislator.
The Republican map resulted in a 1st district with a greater percentage of white, Republican voters. Mace, who is white, won re-election last November by 14 percentage points under the district’s new makeup.
The state conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) civil rights group sued in 2022, arguing that several House districts created under the map were designed at least in part with “a racially discriminatory intent to discriminate against black voters in violation of the U.S. Constitution”.
Is gerrymandering destroying American democracy?
A three-judge federal panel ruled in January that the way the 1st district was drawn violated black voters’ rights under the Constitution’s 14th and 15th amendments, which guarantee equal protection under the law and prevent discrimination based on race prohibit.
The strategies used in drawing the district boundaries, the panel wrote, “ultimately exiled more than 30,000 African-American citizens from their previous district and created a stark racial gerrymander of Charleston County and the City of Charleston.”
The justices — all three appointed by Democratic presidents — ruled that no elections could take place in the 1st District until it is re-drafted, prompting South Carolina Republican officials to appeal to the Supreme Court.
The South Carolina chapter of the NAACP and Taiwan Scott, a black voter living in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, urged judges on Monday to uphold the lower court’s ruling.
“South Carolina’s congressional map is the most recent example in our state’s long, painful history of racial discrimination that needs to be remedied,” they said in a statement. “As the case moves to plea, we implore the court to uphold the panel’s decision and protect Black South Carolina voters from this egregious form of discrimination.”
The case will be heard during the Supreme Court’s next term, which begins in October.
Redistribution is carried out in most states by the party in power, although some states assign the task to independent commissions to ensure fairness. Gerrymandering typically involves consolidating voters who tend to favor a particular party into a small number of districts to reduce their voting rights statewide, while dispersing others into districts in numbers too small to allow a to form a majority.
In another case about redistribution and race, the Supreme Court weighs Alabama’s appeal against a lower court ruling that an electoral map drawn by Republicans showing the boundaries of the state’s seven U.S. House districts shows the influence of black voters illegally diluted. A ruling in the case is expected at the end of June.
