Paul Blumenthal is a senior reporter with the HuffPost Politics team based in Washington, D.C. He covers courts, elections, political economy and political history.
At issue in Wednesday’s case, Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, is whether a three-judge federal district court erred when it ruled that the state legislature had unconstitutionally manipulated racial demographics when drawing lines for the state’s 1st Congressional District, in an effort to achieve a Republican district in the Charleston region.
“We have never had a case where there has been no direct evidence, no map, no strangely configured districts... and, instead, it is all resting on circumstantial evidence,” Chief Justice John Roberts said.Activists gather outside the Supreme Court for oral arguments in the gerrymandering case Alexander v. South Carolina Conference of the NAACP.Throughout the arguments, the liberal justices tried to explain that Supreme Court precedents, including in the 2017 case of Cooper v.
Instead, the district court panel based its ruling in the South Carolina case on expert analyses showing that without taking race into account, the legislature could not have configured the exact balance of Black voters in the district they needed to achieve a Republican-weighted district. The ruling also factored in testimony from lawmakers and map drawers.
Aden explained that one of the four expert analyses did in fact use some partisan political data, but noted that the analyses were also conducted in response to the state’s defense, which argued that it drew the map to follow traditional redistricting criteria, like compactness, contiguity and maintaining communities of interest.
The liberal justices and the lawyers arguing on the side of the plaintiffs, Aden and Assistant to the U.S. Solicitor General Carolina Flynn, sought to raise the fact that the state relied on scant partisan political data, looking only at the 2020 election, while also regularly checking more detailed racial data when drawing the district lines.
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