State lawmakers who approved the map said the changes were driven by political party, not race.
The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed the use of a South Carolina congressional map that a lower court said “exiled” thousands of Black voters to carve out a district safer for a White Republican incumbent.
or was an unconstitutional effort to divvy up voters by race. The 6-3 majority sent the case back to the lower court, finding that it erred when it determined race predominated the map-drawing process. South Carolina had asked the justices to issue a decision by Jan. 1 so this year’s elections can proceed smoothly, but the justices apparently needed more time. The slow pace of the case prompted the lower court - a three-judge federal panel - to rule last month that the state had to use the disputed map this year no matter how the Supreme Court ruled. With the primary slated for June 11, there was no time to draw a new map, the panel said.
population below a certain target in the district, treating Charleston County “in a fundamentally different way than the rest of the state.” Doing so would violate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, which prohibits state lawmakers from considering race as the predominant factor in adopting a new map.South Carolina asked the Supreme Court to intervene, saying that maintaining Republican dominance was the reason for the changes, not race.
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