WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court has long delayed resolving South Carolina's redistricting case, forcing lower courts to intervene and rule Thursday that House districts previously ruled racially gerrymandered will be used in this year's elections. It was decided that it could be done.
Last year, a federal court ruled that the Charleston-area district held by Rep. Nancy Mace, R.S., was illegally drawn by excluding thousands of black voters. .
But on Thursday, the same court said in an order that the map could be used for this year's parliamentary elections.
The three-judge panel said, “With the primary process rapidly approaching, an appeal to the Supreme Court still pending, and no remedial plan in place, ideals succumb to reality. There is a need.”
The decision is a setback for Democrats, but a redrawn map could have resulted in a more favorable map.
The Supreme Court has spent months considering whether map makers illegally considered race when creating the maps, even though both sides say it needs to be resolved before the election. However, no verdict has been rendered yet.
The justices also did not address an emergency petition filed by Republican state officials seeking to keep the existing maps in place, at least for now.
In election litigation, the Supreme Court often urges parties to resolve their cases by election deadlines, but in this case it was the justices themselves who sowed uncertainty.
“It's really bizarre. I can't think of another example like this,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert at UCLA School of Law.
“It's completely unacceptable that the court doesn't say anything,” he added.
Leah Aden, an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund who is representing the plaintiffs, said her side has done everything possible to resolve the case ahead of this year's election.
The lawsuit was filed just days after the map was approved.
“I can't predict what's going on in the Supreme Court, what's going on behind the scenes,” she said.
Although the Supreme Court has not yet ruled, what is clear is that “there will likely be another election under a map that we believe is unconstitutional,” she added.
During the nine-month term from October to June, the justices issued only 11 decisions in contested cases, the majority involving former President Donald Trump.
Oral arguments in the South Carolina case were held on October 11, giving the justices plenty of time to make a decision.
State officials had maintained that their sole purpose in drawing the maps was to make the district more Republican. But in January 2023, a lower court ruled that the race was the primary concern when one of the state's seven electoral districts was drawn. Republicans, led by South Carolina Senate President Thomas Alexander, appealed the decision.
The three-judge panel said the state doesn't have to take any steps to draw new maps until the Supreme Court resolves the appeal, but that doesn't mean the justices could act more quickly. It was with the understanding that he would do so.
Republicans redrawn the boundaries after the 2020 Census to strengthen Republican control of the battleground districts. Democrat Joe Cunningham won the seat in 2018 but narrowly lost to Mace in 2020. Two years later, a new map was created and Mace won by a large margin.
The approximately 30,000 black voters who were moved from their districts were placed in the district of Democratic U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, who is black. This is the only district held by Democrats among the seven congressional districts.
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and other civil rights groups argued that Republicans not only illegally took race into account when drawing maps, but also undermined the power of black voters in doing so.
The claim was based on the Fourteenth Amendment, which requires the law to apply equally to everyone. The case is a different legal theory than the one at issue in a major ruling this year in which civil rights activists successfully challenged Republican-drawn maps in Alabama under the Voting Rights Act. arose based on.
