"Exploiting racial divisions": Kagan says Supreme Court gerrymander ruling will have "odious" impact

[marmar]

(Salon) 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."

Justice Samuel Alito penned the majority opinion, which found the lower court's decision "clearly erroneous" and asserted that, in a state where race and politics "closely correlate," there was no direct evidence of a racial gerrymander.

....(snip)....

"It will be easy enough" for bad actors to "cover their tracks in the end: just raise the 'possibility' of non-race-based decision making, and it will be 'dispositive,'" Kagan wrote in her dissent. "And so this 'odious' practice of sorting citizens, built on racial generalizations and exploiting racial divisions, will continue." ................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/05/23/upholds-stark-racial-gerrymander-limiting-black-voters-power-in-south-carolina/?in_brief=true

[Kid Berwyn]

1. Ideological means "Racist"

Sad day for the USA: SCOTUS majority are NAZI.

[dalton99a]

2. The Supreme Whorehouse never fails to deliver for Republicans.

[marble falls]

3. What Kagen says. Our most immediate relief is voting out GOP legislatures and voting every election after that ...

... state legislatures are where gerrymandering is done.