The decision by the U.S. Supreme Courts conservative majority Thursday to allow South Carolina to proceed with its gerrymandered map of congressional districts led to a blistering dissent by Justice Elena Kagan , who argued that the redistricting was designed to weaken Black voters influence.

The 6-3 ruling, led by conservative Justice Samuel Alito, overturns a lower court decision last year that said Republicans in South Carolina had illegally used race to gerrymander the states 1st Congressional District. In ordering the South Carolina Legislature to redraw its new map, a three-judge U.S. District Court panel said that the GOPs attempt to move Black voters out of the 1st District and move white voters in amounted to a bleaching of the district.

By reversing the lower courts decision, Kagan said that the Supreme Courts majority goes seriously wrong.

The proper response to this case is not to throw up novel roadblocks enabling South Carolina to continue dividing citizens along racial lines, the liberal justice wrote. It is to respect the plausible no, the more than plausible findings of the District Court that the State engaged in race-based districting. And to tell the State that it must redraw District 1, this time without targeting African-American citizens.

South Carolinas decision to redraw the map to remove 60% of Charleston Countys Black residents from the 1st Congressional District and add them to the 6th Congressional District was, Alito said, motivated by politics rather than race. The complaint brought by the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP relied on circumstantial evidence to argue the maps were racially gerrymandered on purpose, he wrote.

But Kagan refused to believe that the effect of the Republicans redistricting on Black voters was an unintended consequence of partisan gerrymandering , given the amount of racial demographic data lawmakers had when drawing the lines.