Federal rulings on other racial redistricting cases involving House districts in Georgia, Louisiana and Arkansas hang on the justices’ decision in the Alabama case. The South Carolina decision, however, will not be affected, because the lawsuit challenging the congressional map claims violations of the Constitution, not the Voting Rights Act.
The South Carolina conference of the N.A.A.C.P. had sued the State Legislature after lawmakers approved a new congressional map last January. The organization claimed in the suit that the map’s configurations of the First, Second and Fifth Congressional Districts had illegally violated Black voters’ rights under the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
But as the trial wound down in late November, the judges focused on the First District, which hugs the Carolina coast from Charleston, the state’s largest city, to Hilton Head. Democrats and Republicans traded control of the House seat in the 2018 and 2020 elections, with the outcome decided by less than a percentage point each time.
The House map approved in January moved 62 percent of the Black voters in Charleston County from the First District into the Sixth District, a seat that Representative Jim Clyburn, a Black Democrat, has held for 30 years.
The shift helped make the new First District a Republican bastion. In November, Representative Nancy Mace, the Republican incumbent, won re-election by 14 percentage points.
Republican legislators freely acknowledged in court testimony that they had redrawn the First District for partisan gain. But they said that they had deliberately avoided looking at the racial breakdown of the new map to insulate themselves from charges of bias, a defense that Republicans have increasingly embraced in other redistricting battles.
In the panel’s opinion on Friday, the three judges noted that the mapmaker hired by the Legislature had testified that he had tried to make as few changes as possible in drawing maps for the state’s other six House seats. But he said he had abandoned that approach in redrawing the First District, and instead made “dramatic changes” and “created tremendous disparity” in Charleston County.
