(Fie/Al Drago/Getty Images)
A federal court “clearly erred” in determining that South Carolina legislators racially gerrymandered congressional voting lines for the coastal 1st District, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday in sending the case back to the three-judge panel for further analysis on a separate question.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, repeatedly used the terms “clearly erred” and “clearly erroneous” to describe the lower court’s reasoning for its 2023 ruling that the lines were unconstitutionally drawn.
“To sum up our analysis so far, no direct evidence supports the District Court’s finding that race predominated in the design of District 1,” Alito wrote.
Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote the 34-page dissenting opinion, was joined by liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court’s newest member.
Kagan scoffed at the majority’s reasoning.
“The Challengers introduced more than enough evidence of racial gerrymandering to support the District Court’s judgment,” she wrote. “The majority picks and chooses evidence to its liking; ignores or minimizes less convenient proof; disdains the panel’s judgments about witness credibility; and makes a series of mistakes about expert opinions.”
The case will return to the lower court to re-evaluate challengers’ separate claim of voter dilution. Alito said the judges’ ruling on that was tied to faulty reasoning.
“In light of our conclusion that those findings were clearly erroneous, that conclusion cannot
stand,” Alito wrote.
Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with most of Alito’s conclusions but wrote a separate opinion disagreeing that any further analysis is needed.
The complaint “combines two stereotypes by assuming that black South Carolinians can be properly represented only by a black Democrat,” Thomas wrote. “The vote dilution analysis in this case inevitably reduces black Charlestonians to partisan pawns and racial tokens. The analysis is demeaning to the courts asked to perform it, to say nothing of the black voters that it stereotypes.”
The three lower court judges — Richard Gergel, Mary Geiger Lewis and Toby Heytens — ruled in January 2023 that state lawmakers drew the coastal 1st District, held by Republican Nancy Mace, in a way that discriminates against Black voters.
The judicial panel sided with the NAACP, ACLU of South Carolina and Taiwan Scott, a Black Hilton Head Island resident who lives in the 1st District, who sued after the Legislature approved new lines following the 2020 census.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
Justices
The post U.S. Supreme Court: Lower court was wrong in its racial gerrymandering ruling appeared first on SC Daily Gazette.