This week, the Supreme Court made it harder for plaintiffs to win racial gerrymandering claims in a 6-3 decision that legal experts say is the latest sign of the court’s shift away from policing gerrymandering cases.

The NAACP’s South Carolina State Conference had sued over South Carolina’s GOP-led legislature’s new congressional map for shifting tens of thousands of Black voters to a different district. Lawmakers appealed to the Supreme Court when a three-judge panel found the district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

Thursday’s decision, authored by Justice Samuel Alito, said that plaintiffs have to show that the state had “the purpose and effect” of diluting the minority vote – not just that “race played a predominant role” in redistricting.

“The legislature’s partisan goal can easily explain this decision,” Alito wrote of the decision to move “predominantly black Charleston precincts from District 1 to District 6.”

Bertrall Ross, a University of Virginia School of Law professor, said he found the decision “unsurprising” in the context of the Supreme Court’s recent history of rulings on gerrymandering.

“What that acknowledgement does is it cements the status of partisan gerrymandering as a non-justiciable question that the courts will not police – which given the partisan dimensions of our democracy, is a troubling position for us to be in,” Ross told Salon.

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Ross said the court’s stance makes it tricky to police racial gerrymandering because “there historically has been and still continues to be a high correlation between racial voting and partisan voting.”

“And so how do you disentangle whether a particular dispute involves racial or partisan gerrymandering?” Ross questioned. “What I think the court has done is set up these cases in a way that's easier for the state to make the argument that all we were doing was taking partisanship into account. We weren't thinking about race. And to the extent that it's easier for the state to do that, it makes it harder for the court to police real instances of racial gerrymandering.”

Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard Law School professor, said now, when a state defends a map as partisan and not racial, plaintiffs suing over the map have to “include an alternative map that equally accomplishes the state’s partisan goal but results in a........

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