On October 11, the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to racially gerrymandered congressional maps in South Carolina that could tell us a lot about where the Court stands on voting rights.
The lower court in this case, known as Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, determined that the state’s Republican legislature excluded Black voters from the state’s First Congressional District in order to shore up Republican control of that district.
The stakes in any congressional gerrymandering case are high because these cases can potentially impact who will control the US House of Representatives in the future. And the Court’s ultimate decision in Alexander may be unusually significant.
For years, the Supreme Court’s Republican majority had been almost unrelentingly hostile toward voting rights plaintiffs, and especially toward the Voting Rights Act — a federal law that bans race discrimination in elections. But in a surprising move last June, the Court struck down an Alabama gerrymander, affirming a lower court decision holding that the state violated the Voting Rights Act when it drew congressional maps that diluted Black voting power within that state.
Notably, the Court’s 5-4 decision in that case, known as Allen v. Milligan (2023), was written by Chief Justice John Roberts, and it rested upon a provision of the Voting Rights Act that Roberts unsuccessfully pushed President Ronald Reagan to veto when he was a young political appointee in the Justice Department.
So Milligan is potentially the first sign that the Court’s hostility toward voting rights plaintiffs is diminishing. Now, with Alexander, the first major voting rights case the Court has taken up since, we could see how committed to that pivot the justices actually are.
Technically, the legal issue in Alexander is distinct from the one in Milligan. Milligan held that Alabama violated the Voting Rights Act when it drew its congressional maps, while the lower court in…
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