The writing may be on the wall for the way South Carolina Republicans gerrymandered the First Congressional District for the 2022 election now that the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in October about the remapping effort.
Good. Let’s hope the court forces the map to be redrawn so it reflects the true electoral nature of our lower coast, not a district that the GOP bleached by moving thousands of Black voters to other districts. For now, we’ll just have to wait.
In January, a three-judge panel of federal appellate judges here ruled unanimously that the First District “illegally removed 62 percent of the Black voters in Charleston County,” according to published reports.
So it is long past time for the high court to redress S.C. reapportionment grievances now that three rulings in June suggest the way that South Carolina Republicans drew the increasingly competitive First District was hyper-partisan and didn’t reflect the real shifts in population along the South Carolina coast.
In early June, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 5-4 ruling in an Alabama redistricting case that surprised many. It essentially held that Alabama violated the Voting Rights Act by crafting only one of its seven congressional seats as a majority Black district when one in four Alabamians is Black. This week, Alabama Republicans rejected calls to create a second majority Black district, saying they can redraw the congressional map as required by June decision.
Later in June, the high court issued two more reapportionment rulings. In a case from North Carolina, the high court ruled 6-3 to uphold a decision by the North Carolina’s Supreme Court that held the state’s Republican Party was excessively partisan under state law in its congressional redistricting plan. The federal ruling, however, did say there were limits to state court election efforts. In Louisiana, federal justices allowed a lower federal appellate court to continue its consideration of a move to review Louisiana’s congressional map of reapportioned districts.
So maybe you see where South Carolina’s case is going. In 2018, Charleston lawyer Joe Cunningham flipped the First District to Democrats for the first time in a generation, indicating the seat’s increasingly competitive nature. He lost reelection in 2020 to GOP candidate Nancy Mace, who picked up more White voters in the 2022 redistricting now being challenged and won reelection by 14 points.
Michael B. Moore, a well-known Black Democrat running against Mace in 2024, stands to benefit if more Black voters are returned to the First District by a new map.
In a statement, Moore observed, “When hearing this case, the [Supreme] Court should abide by the same standards of justice and jurisprudence that it applied in a handful of decisions last month — when the Court rejected Republican attempts to gerrymander state congressional maps in Alabama, Louisiana and North Carolina. …
“As the descendant of several pioneering public servants and civil rights leaders, I believe strongly in the sanctity of free and fair elections — and that government of all the people, by all the people and for all the people is imperative for the functioning of a healthy democracy.”
Hear, hear.
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