This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes. 

On Wednesday, the South Carolina Supreme Court decided that it has no power to protect Black voters from partisan gerrymandering, dismissing a challenge to the state’s congressional district map as a “nonjusticiable political question” in a 5-0 opinion. The only people with the legal power to un-gerrymander the state, it seems, are the Republican lawmakers who gerrymandered it in the first place.

In 2021, South Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature adopted maps that moved over 30,000 Black residents out of the state’s first congressional district, reducing its Black population to 17 percent—the precise amount necessary, per GOP analyses of partisan voting patterns, to keep Black voters from threatening Republican dominance in District 1, which is currently represented by Republican Nancy Mace. This little maneuver is likely enough to prevent the state’s Democrats from competing to oust her, and to pick up a seat in Congress.

In 2023, a three-judge panel of South Carolina’s federal district court unanimously struck down this ambitiously racist map as unconstitutional. But in 2024, the........

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