South Carolina's Racial Gerrymandering Is Headed To The Supreme Court
Maybe we should start calling racial gerrymandering to exclude black voters 'reverse affirmative action.' People only seem to care when you put 'reverse' in front of it.
Does anyone else find it interesting that our Court is trying to figure out if affirmative action is still needed as active racial gerrymandering is going on? Just me? Well, all right. Once SCOTUS finishes with the high-profile affirmative action case from North Carolina, they can get started on the mess that is South Carolina’s district drawing. From ABA Journal:
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear an appeal to a decision striking down a redrawn South Carolina congressional district for discriminating against Black voters.
The court on Monday noted probable jurisdiction in the case, which involves mandatory rather than discretionary jurisdiction, SCOTUSblog reported in a preview.
A three-judge panel had ruled in January that South Carolina lawmakers violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment when they moved Black voters out of the state’s Congressional District 1 to meet a racial target of 17%, producing a “Republican tilt.”
It’s funny, you’d think that there would be protections in place that might prevent such a bold exclusion of a minority group from representative democracy. Maybe there should be some statute in place that maintains the right to vote for them. Oh wait, that existed and the Court got rid of it with Shelby County v. Holder. You see, states like Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina — the ones with a history of racial terror at the polls — used to be under higher scrutiny before they could attempt to carve up voting blocs. Once section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act got thrown out like the Supreme Court giving a damn about their legitimacy, things reverted to the old normal. Remember “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet?” Yeah, nobody could have seen this coming.
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Adriel I. Cepeda Derieux, deputy director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said in a statement that the redrawn district was “a textbook racial gerrymander and discriminatory map.”
“The facts and law are clear,” Derieux said. “South Carolina mapmakers brazenly moved Black voters in disproportionate numbers out of the Charleston County-anchored Congressional District 1 in order to hold on to political power.”
I’d say I’m looking forward to how the Supreme Court will rule on this matter but, dear reader, I wouldn’t want to lie to you.
Did Court Fail To ‘Disentangle Race From Politics’ When It Overturned Voting Map? SCOTUS To Decide [ABA Journal]
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Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.
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