To someone unfamiliar with the country’s recent redistricting history, Wednesday’s Supreme Court oral arguments must have sounded bizarre.
The justices and attorneys alike all candidly acknowledged that South Carolina legislators had manipulated their maps to artificially maximize Republican vote power and minimize Democrats’. They made no attempt to obfuscate that state Republicans were determined to pick their own voters, to rig elections until it became virtually impossible for their party to lose.
It’s a reflection of how grotesque redistricting cases have become ever since the conservatives on the Supreme Court, in 2019, decided that partisan gerrymandering cases were no longer justiciable in federal court. The only danger for South Carolina legislators, then, would come from the Supreme Court agreeing with the district judge panel that they’d used voters’ race — rather than party — to try to achieve that partisan end. It paints another layer of farce onto the case that, particularly in the South, race and partisan lean are often inextricably linked.
The right-wing justices, almost all of whom sounded firmly on the side of the South Carolina lawmakers, were dismissive of the plaintiffs’ case, which they said rested on circumstantial evidence.
“You’re trying to carry [your burden] without any direct evidence, with no alternative map, with no odd-shaped districts which we often get in gerrymandering cases and with a wealth of political data you’re suggesting your friends on other side would ignore in favor of racial data,” Chief Justice John Roberts said to the plaintiffs’ lawyer. “Have we ever had a case before where all it is is circumstantial evidence?”
Despite Roberts’ dismissal, the circumstantial evidence — which was enough for a panel of three federal judges to decide against the South Carolina lawmakers — is fairly compelling.
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