In a 6-3 vote that fell cleanly along ideological lines, the Supreme Court reversed a lower court's ruling that GOP lawmakers in South Carolina improperly used race to give Republicans a representational advantage in the state's U.S. House delegation, per CBS News. The court's right-wing majority accepted Republicans' arguments that politics, not race, was the predominant factor in their map-making process.
The case centered on a 2022 congressional map drawn by the Republican-led state legislature that packed 30,000 Black residents from the state's first congressional district to its sixth congressional district, which was already a Black-majority district. The shift meant that the first, previously red-tinted district would become more solidly Republican. The lower court had termed this a "stark racial gerrymander."
