"The 6-3 ruling from the high court reverses the ruling from a three-judge district court panel that found GOP lawmakers improperly used race when designing Congressional District 1, represented by Republican Rep. Nancy Mace.
In a majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court's conservative justices said that the district court's findings were "clearly erroneous." Race and politics "closely correlate" in South Carolina, and voters who challenged the congressional lines failed to provide direct evidence of a racial gerrymander, the Supreme Court said.
"The fact of the matter is that politics pervaded the highly visible mapmaking process from start to finish," Alito wrote.
In a dissenting opinion written by Justice Elena Kagan, and joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, the three liberal justices accused the majority of cherry-picking evidence presented during the lower court proceedings and "reworking the law" to impede racial-gerrymandering cases.
Washington " The Supreme Court on Thursday maintained the lines of a congressional district in South Carolina that a lower court had invalidated as an unlawful racial gerrymander, delivering a win to Republican mapmakers who said they used politics, not race, as the predominant factor when drawing the district bounds.
The 6-3 ruling from the high court reverses the ruling from a three-judge district court panel that found GOP lawmakers improperly used race when designing Congressional District 1, represented by Republican Rep. Nancy Mace.
In a majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court's conservative justices said that the district court's findings were "clearly erroneous." Race and politics "closely correlate" in South Carolina, and voters who challenged the congressional lines failed to provide direct evidence of a racial gerrymander, the Supreme Court said.
"The fact of the matter is that politics pervaded the highly visible mapmaking process from start to finish," Alito wrote.
In a dissenting opinion written by Justice Elena Kagan, and joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, the three liberal justices accused the majority of cherry-picking evidence presented during the lower court proceedings and "reworking the law" to impede racial-gerrymandering cases.
"The proper response to this case is not to throw up novel roadblocks enabling South Carolina to continue dividing citizens along racial lines," Kagan wrote. "It is to respect the plausible " no, the more than plausible " findings of the district court that the state engaged in race-based districting. And to tell the state that it must redraw District 1, this time without targeting African-American citizens.""
