The Supreme Court will hear a case concerning redistricting next week, where representatives for South Carolina will argue that a lower court’s ruling, which found they had performed illegal racial gerrymandering, was wrong because they had focused on politics rather than race.

The case, Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP,  concerns maps drawn for South Carolina during the 2022 redistricting cycle.

In a ruling at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals a three-judge panel unanimously found that race was a “predominant motivating factor in the General Assembly’s design” and that the legislature had imposed a racial target when drawing the First District in the state, a coastal district home to tens of thousands of Black Charleston residents.

The state arguing that the appeals court failed to “disentangle race from politics” says that the district was not racially gerrymandered but instead drawn to ensure a “stronger Republican tilt,” which they claim is justified because Congresswoman Nancy Mace narrowly won the district by one point in 2020. In the newly drawn 2022 district, Ms. Mace won by 14 points.

In Congress, Ms. Mace has established a reputation as a staunch conservative and this week was one of a handful of conservative representatives who voted to oust Congressman Kevin McCarthy as speaker.

While the lower court was not friendly to these arguments, writing that racial gerrymandering “is impermissible even if mapmakers used race as a proxy for politics,” the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case as part of a string of cases they have heard on the subject.

Earlier this year, the Court issued an unexpected five to four ruling in favor of Black voters in Alabama who had challenged district maps in the state on the basis of racially biased map drawing.

The ruling was a defeat for the Republican-led effort to weaken the Voting Rights Act and forced the state to create another minority-majority district for its Black residents, a district that will likely elect a Democratic representative.

In the ruling, Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined with the Court’s liberal justices in ruling that Alabama, a state where more than one-quarter of the population is Black, needed more than one of their seven districts to be majority Black.

In the South Carolina case, as in the Alabama case, the decision could affect control of the House of Representatives, where Republicans maintain a narrow majority.

The South Carolina case could also be an opportunity for the Court to alter the interpretation of the Voting Rights Act, something that Justice Roberts appeared willing to do in oral arguments for the Alabama case but declined to do in the ruling on the subject.