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 dissent, liberal justices warned that the court was insulating states from claims of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering.
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.
''I'm very disturbed about the outcome. It's as if we don't matter. But we do matter and our voices deserve to be heard,'' said Taiwan Scott, a Black voter who sued over the redistricting.
President Joe Biden, whose administration backed Scott and the other plaintiffs at the Supreme Court, also criticized the ruling. ''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.
Mace, reacting to the decision, said, ''It reaffirms everything everyone in South Carolina already knows, which is that the line wasn't based on race.''
The case presented the court with the tricky issue of how to distinguish race from politics. The state argued that partisan politics, not race, and a population boom in coastal areas explain the congressional map. Moving voters based on their politics is OK, the Supreme Court has held.
A lower court had ordered South Carolina to redraw the district after it found that the state used race as a proxy for partisan affiliation in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.