South Carolina redistricting decision explained

Republicans accomplished the goal of protecting [Nancy] Mace by systematically removing Black voters from her district. The new map splits the city of Charleston, South Carolina, in two, and takes most of the Black voters who live there out of District 1 and puts them in District 6 (which is currently represented by Representative Jim Clyburn and is the only one of the state’s seven districts currently held by a Democrat).

I’m not the only person who thinks removing a bunch of Black voters from a district to make it safer for a white Republican Congresswoman is racist and therefore unconstitutional. A three-judge district court panel in South Carolina ruled that District 1 was a racial gerrymander and ordered South Carolina to redraw its maps.

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It was [appealed and] literally one of the first cases the [Supreme] court heard in this term. But the court waited until yesterday, seven-and-a-half months after hearing oral arguments, to issue its ruling determining which maps South Carolina can use in the upcoming congressional election. That is significant because, while the Supreme Court was dragging its feet on this case, the South Carolina district court withdrew its order, saying that there was no longer enough time for the legislature to redraw the map even if the legislature lost its appeal. The Supreme Court locked in South Carolina’s racist gerrymander, simply by doing nothing.

Thursday’s opinion rubber-stamping South Carolina’s racism was therefore not really about South Carolina; it was about preventing future challenges to racist maps. Alito accomplished this by effectively making it impossible for Black people to prove that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause has been violated when our voting rights are taken away through racist gerrymandering. He did this by ruling that state legislatures must be presumed to be acting in good faith.

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Alito didn’t actually contest the fact that the voters were removed because they were Black. Instead, he simply doesn’t care. Alito said that because race is highly correlated with voting behavior, trying to make a district more Republican means trying to make a district more white. Since making a district more Republican is constitutionally permissible, making a district as white as possible must also be permissible.

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He says that you generally need “direct evidence” of racism, which basically translates to finding a Republican map-maker who says, “I’m finna do some racism, today!”

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He said that the experts were wrong. He said that the district court made a “clear error” of fact. The NAACP did not have Mark Sanford on the phone to his Argentinian girlfriend saying we gotta get the Blacks out of District 1, so none of the evidence the NAACP did have mattered, according to Alito.

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan (joined by justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson) hammered Alito over his disregard for the factual record. Kagan was incisive, so I’ll just quote her:

The majority picks and chooses evidence to its liking; ignores or minimizes less convenient proof; disdains the [district court’s] judgments about witness credibility; and makes a series of mistakes about expert opinions. The majority declares that it knows better than the District Court what happened in a South Carolina map-drawing room to produce District 1…. In the majority’s version, all the deference that should go to the court’s factual findings for the plaintiffs instead goes to the losing defendant, because it is presumed to act in good faith…. So the wrong side gets the benefit of the doubt[.]

Kagan also wrote that Alito used an “upside-down form of clear-error review.” I don’t know if that was an oblique reference to Alito’s flag controversies, but it makes life better to believe that it is.

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Over on Bluesky, Adam Serwer summarized the court’s ruling accurately: “I hope people understand that what we are seeing is the systematic destruction of the civil war amendments by the Supreme Court, which are what made America [an] actual democracy and upon which all minority rights in the United States rely.” That is the irreducible point of the court’s ruling.

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The votes of the white majority (and more specifically, the Republican majority within the white majority) are the only votes that are allowed to matter. Trump lost the election, but he won the white vote. Since [Alito, and Thomas as well] think only the white vote matters, it’s not antidemocratic, to them, to think that Trump should still be in charge.

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[S]ince most Black people refuse to accept the wisdom of white conservatives, whites have to gerrymander Black political power away, and that has to be constitutional.

  The Nation

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.