Supreme Court finds no bias against Black voters in a South Carolina congressional district

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ‘s conservative majority on Thursday preserved a Republican-held South Carolina congressional district, rejecting a lower-court ruling that said the district discriminated against Black voters. In a 6-3 decision, the court held that South Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature did nothing wrong during redistricting when it strengthened Rep. Nancy Mace’s hold on the coastal district by moving 30,000 Democratic-leaning Black residents of Charleston out of the district. “The Supreme Court’s decision today undermines the basic principle that voting practices should not discriminate on account of race and that is wrong,” Biden said in a statement. “Perhaps most dispiriting,” Kagan wrote, the court adopted “special rules to specially disadvantage suits to remedy race-based redistricting.” Richard Hasen, an election expert at the University of California at Los Angeles law school, agreed with Kagan, writing in a blog post that the decision “makes it easier for Republican states to engage in redistricting to help white Republicans maximize their political power.” Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said in a statement, “The highest court in our land greenlit racial discrimination in South Carolina’s redistricting process, denied Black voters the right to be free from the race-based sorting and sent a message that facts, process, and precedent will not protect the Black vote.” However, Sen. Thomas Alexander, the president of the South Carolina Senate, praised the ruling.