The Supreme Court sided with South Carolina Republicans in a racial gerrymandering case that’s the Republican-majority court’s latest ruling curbing voting rights.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote the 6-3 ruling, joined by his fellow Republican appointees in the majority and with Democratic appointees dissenting.
The Supreme Court has disallowed racial gerrymandering but enabled partisan gerrymandering. Of course, it can be difficult to distinguish between the two. Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the 5-4 decision in 2019 effectively blessing partisan gerrymandering, noted during the October argument in this South Carolina case that “disentangling race and politics in a situation like this is very, very difficult.”
Following the 2020 census, South Carolina Republicans pushed a congressional map that kicked out more than 30,000 Black people from the state’s 1st Congressional District. Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., had won the seat in 2020 by barely beating a Democrat. Republicans apparently didn’t want to chance another close one, and Mace won by a wider margin in 2022 with the new map in place.
But a three-judge panel in January 2023, which evaluate