Ethnicity

Huffington Post - The Supreme Court overturned a lower court decision that found that South Carolina Republicans improperly used race to gerrymander the state’s 1st Congressional District in a Thursday decision. A three-judge federal district court panel ruled in 2023 that the lines drawn in the state’s 1st Congressional District were an illegal racial gerrymander. The legislature’s movement of Black voters out and white voters in amounted to a “bleaching” of the district, the district court said in a ruling that Republicans in the state legislature later appealed to the Supreme Court. But the conservative majority on the Supreme Court disagreed in a 6-3 opinion that reversed and remanded the lower court decision. The majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, argued that the complaint brought by the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP relied on “circumstantial” evidence that the state legislature used race when it drew the 1st District’s lines. Instead, the majority sided with South Carolina’s argument that the state’s movement of Black voters in and white voters out of the district was merely a side effect of their attempt at partisan gerrymandering.