Samuel Alito Really, Really, Really Wants to Save This Racial Gerrymander in South Carolina

[justaprogressive]

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, a challenge to South Carolina’s congressional map based on the contention that it was an impermissible racial gerrymander. The case should have been easy for the groups that challenged the map, given the applicable law and the arguments advanced by the state’s lawmakers in defense of their map—which was found to be unconstitutional by the lower court.

Unfortunately for the challengers of that map, Justice Samuel Alito had other ideas. After more than two hours of Alito-centered arguments, the question for his other conservative colleagues will be whether they side with him, change the law, and have the Supreme Court serve as a super-trial court in such cases—allowing the high court to reject trial court findings when they come out a way the conservative majority doesn’t like.

snip

A three-judge district court had, after an extensive trial, decided that South Carolina engaged in an impermissible racial gerrymander to one of its congressional districts in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. When rebalancing congressional districts after the Census required moving voters from one district to another, the state didn’t simply move the number of voters required. Instead of moving 90,000 residents out of the overpopulated district and into the underpopulated one, the state swapped more than 50,000 residents into the overpopulated district and moved 140,000 residents out of it. The decisions about who was moved out of the district were done in a way, the district court found, that kept the Black voting-age population in the district at the same level—in part to help ensure that district would remain a Republican district—even as the new demographics of the area suggested the Black voting-age population in the district should increase.

As the lower court concluded:

With the movement of over 30,000 African American residents of Charleston County out of Congressional District No. 1 to meet the African American population target of 17%, Plaintiffs’ right to be free from an unlawful racial gerrymander under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has been violated.

[link:https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/10/samuel-alito-wants-racial-gerrymander-south-carolina.html|

[LymphocyteLover]

1. Alito is a sick fuck, and it's like a contest to see who can be more terrible between him and

Clarence Thomas