South Carolina will use unconstitutional map amid pending appeal

A federal court ruled Thursday that South Carolina can use a congressional map it previously ruled unconstitutional due to its harmful impact on Black voters, given the upcoming primary and the U.S. Supreme Court’s delay in taking motion on the appeal thing.

A 3-judge panel ruled that South Carolina’s congressional map wouldn’t be modified, though it had previously ruled that the map violated the constitutional rights of Black voters. The state’s primary election will be June 11, with early voting starting in lower than two months.

Democrat Michael B. Moore, a congressional candidate for South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, expressed disappointment with the court’s decision.

“It makes no legal sense. “It’s painful for black voters in South Carolina because they only have one real option to send someone to Congress,” Albright said.

Adriel I. Cepeda Derieux, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, said in an announcement that the court’s decision “undermined democracy.”

Derieux added that the ruling “further entrenched voter suppression in the state.”

Last yr, the identical three-judge panel took up Alexander v. South Carolina Conference of the NAACP The NAACP argued that Republican lawmakers violated Black voters’ 14th and fifteenth Amendment rights by unconstitutionally moving hundreds of Black residents from the state’s 1st Congressional District to other districts, including Democrat James Clyburn’s sixth Congressional District, to scale back power. Black voters.

In January 2023, judges ordered South Carolina to redraw its controversial congressional map since it was “unconstitutional.” The Republican-led state filed an appeal wherein the Supreme Court granted certiorari and stayed the lower court’s decision to redraw the map.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments last fall, and lots of suspected the court would issue a call before the March deadline to present lawmakers a probability to redraw the map. However, the court has not issued an opinion yet.

Given the present election cycle, lower court justices felt pressure to act quickly and decided to maintain the present map.

“With the primary elections approaching, appeals to the Supreme Court still pending and the absence of a remedial plan, the ideal must become practice,” the judges said. he wrote.

Moore suggested that the Supreme Court was “playing politics.”

“They didn’t want to measure the scale of this race and potentially increase the number of Democratic votes in the district,” Moore said. “So the lower court was forced to use the current map.”

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She added that “plaintiffs have made every effort to obtain a decision and remedy before the next election on a map that deprives them of rights.”

Moore is confident he will have the option to unseat Mace in November.

“We have a plan and a team that will turn this seat over,” Moore said. “Republicans are doing everything they can to stay in power as long as possible.”

It comes a day after some voting rights advocates criticized federal judges for upholding Florida’s congressional map ahead of the 2024 general election.

“They are creating apartheid-like conditions to maintain power and keep minority voters from deciding where state resources go,” Albright said.

“This needs to be put to an end and if the Supreme Court refuses to do so, people will have to start fighting tooth and nail to change it,” she added.