South Carolina Republicans defied President Donald Trump’s calls to redraw the state’s only majority-Black district on Tuesday, in a swift rebuke of a weekslong pressure campaign to redistrict following the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision late last month.
The state Senate adjourned Tuesday afternoon without considering the House-passed map. Early voting for South Carolina’s June 9 primaries began earlier in the day and the state Senate will not reconvene until the day after the election concludes. The proposed map would have drawn out the seat of Rep. Jim Clyburn, the state’s lone House Democrat. The legislature was meeting in a special session called by Republican Gov. Henry McMaster earlier this month, right after the regular session ended.
Many South Carolina Republicans previously spoke out against redistricting in the state, including the state Senate majority leader, Shane Massey. Ultimately, 11 Republican state senators joined him to vote with Democrats against ending debate early Tuesday, which could have allowed for consideration of the new congressional map.
“We charged the hill,” Republican state Sen. Larry Grooms said in a statement. “Republicans and the White House worked quickly to pass a redistricting plan before the start of in-person voting but the call from the Governor came too late.”
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The White House was heavily involved in the calls to redistrict, with Massey telling reporters in the statehouse that his first conversations with Trump had occurred as South Carolina was considering taking up redistricting, and that the president had called multiple times.
“The president told me, ‘Look, I hope you can help us out, but I understand you got to do what you’re comfortable with, you got to do what you think is right,” Massey recounted Trump saying as he gave an impassioned 45-minute floor speech earlier this month before he voted against advancing legislation to take up redistricting.
Massey, in his May 12 speech, said that South Carolina had done as the president had asked and examined their maps, but that the Supreme Court’s April decision did not apply to South Carolina because, he said, they did not have a “Section 2 district,” or a district drawn to ensure minority representation.
Jace Woodrum, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina, told NOTUS on Tuesday that he believed early voting was ultimately what led the lawmakers to abandon the measure for now. Woodrum, however, said he doesn’t view the state Senate’s action Tuesday to be the end of the line for redistricting in South Carolina.
“I do not think that this conversation is closed forever,” Woodrum said. “I do think that lawmakers will return in the next legislative session and consider changes to the map. There was some conversation throughout (the) debate around changing more than just the congressional map as well, but there was also conversation that revealed how little time was spent analyzing the map, and that there were precincts on the map that didn’t exist anymore, and so the rush job here became a concern.”
In the redistricting session, which lasted nearly two weeks, Woodrum said that conversations with lawmakers from both sides of the aisle made clear that there was bipartisan discomfort in the Senate about the timing of the effort, and that the high turnout in early voting was a big motivator. Moving forward, he said he’s worried about the disproportionate impact that any new map could have on Black voters, particularly by moving them into new congressional districts.
Republicans hold six of the seven House districts in South Carolina. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court striking down a key section of the Voting Rights Act in late April, states across the South, including Tennessee, Louisiana and Alabama, have moved to consider redistricting in favor of Republicans.
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