South Carolina Republicans can use discriminatory map for 2024, court rules

A federal court will allow South Carolina Republicans to use their congressional map for the 2024 election, it said on Thursday, despite an earlier finding that the same plan discriminates against Black voters. The decision is a big win for Republicans, who were aided by the US supreme court’s slow action on the case.

In January 2023, a three-judge panel struck down the state’s first congressional district, which is currently represented by Nancy Mace, a Republican. The judges said legislative Republicans had impermissibly used race when they redrew it after the 2020 census. As part of an effort to make it more solidly Republican, lawmakers removed 30,000 Black voters from the district into a neighboring one. Republicans argued that they moved the voters to achieve partisan ends, which is legal. The district was extremely competitive in 2020, but Mace easily won the redrawn version in 2022.

The ruling is a significant boon to House Republicans, who are trying to keep a razor-thin majority in Congress’s lower chamber this year.

The US supreme court heard oral arguments in the case, Alexander v South Carolina Conference of the NAACP, on 11 October and seemed poised allow the GOP map to remain in place. But the court has not yet issued a decision. The justices still could potentially order the state to come up with a new map before the 2024 election, though that seems less likely as the state’s 11 June primary approaches. The supreme court has adopted in recent years an idea called the Purcell principle in which it does not disrupt maps or election practices as an election nears.

“A second election under an infirm map is justice delayed when plaintiffs have made every effort to get a decision and remedy before another election under a map that denies them their rights,” said Leah Aden, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who argued the case at the supreme court last year. “As with any civil rights struggle, we will be unrelenting in our fight for our constitutional rights.”

South Carolina officials had asked the supreme court to issue a ruling by 1 January 2024 in order to have a resolution ahead of the state’s primary.

Lawyers representing state officials had recently started arguing that South Carolina’s June congressional primary was fast approaching so the state should be allowed to use the old map.

At the request of South Carolina Republicans, the trial court said they did not have to come up with a new map until 30 days after a final decision from the supreme court. But, it added “on the outside chance the process is not completed in time for the 2024 primary and general election schedule, the election for Congressional District No 1 should not be conducted until a remedial plan is in place”.

The three-judge panel acknowledged on Thursday that what it once considered unlikely had now come to fruition. It acknowledged the difficulty of coming up with a new map ahead of the upcoming primary. Overseas and military ballots must be sent out by 27 April for the state’s 11 June primary.

“Having found that Congressional District No 1 constitutes an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, the Court fully recognizes that ‘it would be the unusual case in which a court would be justified in not taking appropriate action to insure that no further elections are conducted under an invalid plan,’” the panel wrote. “But with the primary election procedures rapidly approaching, the appeal before the Supreme Court still pending, and no remedial plan in place, the ideal must bend to the practical.”

The case is the most recent example of how litigants have been able to take advantage of the Purcell principle. By dragging out cases as long as possible, Republicans have been able to keep discriminatory maps and election practices in place for additional elections.

In a brief to the supreme court earlier this week, the plaintiffs in the case said that it would be inappropriate for the justices to allow South Carolina to use its map for another election.

“Contrary to Defendants’ pleas, thirteen full months of legislative inaction does not warrant a stay. There is still time to draft and enact a remedial plan for the 2024 congressional elections,” they wrote. “Defendants offer no explanation for why they did not expeditiously request the relief they now seek last year, or even in January or February of 2024. Nor do Defendants explain why they have not yet begun legislative proceedings to enact contingent remedial plans, as other states have done in response to judicial rulings.”