South Carolina Republican Senators Tank Redristricting Efforts Again
Their excuse? Early voting has already started.
South Carolina’s Republican senators helped shoot down attempts to redraw the state’s Congressional map, which is backed by President Donald Trump.
The Senate voted 26-18 to kill the bill. The vote included 14 Republicans, nine more than the first vote.
Their excuse? Early voting has already started.
From the South Carolina Daily Gazette:
“Neither my conscience nor my common sense will allow me to stop an election underway,” said Sen. Richard Cash of Anderson County. “The deadline is past. Voting has begun. It is time to conclude the matter.”
By noon Tuesday, 26,000 South Carolinians had voted in person. That’s more than the total for the first day of early voting in 2024. The tally rose to 32,300 an hour later. In addition, more than 4,100 mailed absentee ballots had been returned by Tuesday, according to the state Election Commission.
Recognizing that Republicans will be angry at the Senate, Cash stressed that the fastest the bill could become law would be sometime Wednesday, after many more thousands of people will have voted. The only way it could have passed sooner was if at least 31 senators — a two-thirds supermajority — had voted Friday to ignore the chamber’s rules for redistricting debates. But that motion failed twice.
The opponents also insist that the state Supreme Court would strike down the map:
Republican opponents in the chamber have repeatedly said the map would likely get struck down by the state Supreme Court because of the rushed process. The record in the Legislature of its creation involved less than 8 minutes of testimony from the drawer of the map, Adam Kincaid, who spoke virtually at a House subcommittee hearing. He did not address senators during a day-long hearing last week.
“Our record is 7 minutes 40 seconds talking to the House via Zoom. That’s our record! No questions, no demographic analysis,” Sen. Tom Davis, R-Beaufort, said Tuesday in explaining his “no” votes. “I’m stunned — stunned — something like this” advanced as far as it did in the Senate.
“Something completely unvetted — something we had no role in shaping,” he continued, “it should come as no surprise that it’s rife with errors. Not only are precincts split, you have precincts that no longer exist.”
Gov. Henry McMaster called for a special session after the Senate blocked the legislation on May 12.
Five Republicans joined the Democrats in that vote.
The new map would shift 1.5 million voting-age citizens into different districts.
The idea is to make the state 7R – 0D. Right now, Rep. Jim Clyburn is the only Democrat holding a seat in South Carolina.
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even some in CA are asking to rethink the rcv they have put in place NOW FEARFUL that the gop is gaining ground b/c of all the newsom/bass f ups
so now they want to stop the rcv !!!
speaking of judicial coverups etc:
WHY WONT THEY NAME THE CRIMINALS???
A federal judge has been disciplined for having sex in their chambers with a high-ranking law enforcement officer within earshot of staff, attending a partisan political event and for lying to superior judges who investigated the claims.
But the identity of the judge is being kept private by the Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability of the Judicial Conference of the United States in its decision issued Friday.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/26/us-judge-courts-sex-police-disciplinary.html
Another good reason not to have early or mail-in voting.
The problem in this case isn’t really early voting, it’s trying to shove something on the ballot two weeks before the election.
Weird how RINOs always seem to start late, flounder around for a bit, and then trip themselves up on process and have to declare failure.
Don’t worry – next time they will get it right.
Pinky promise.
Especially the ones who have apparently never heard of statutes of limitations.
Since the excuse offered up is ‘voting underway’ and that voting is ‘early’ then its every fair to blame ‘early voting’.
SC could do what Bama did. Create new map and hold the election as scheduled BUT invalidate any votes for the ‘not districts’. Then allow a period of campaigning and informing voters for newly drawn districts and schedule a special election for those districts.
The real problem was the Gov failing to call a special session immediately. That would have gotten the parliamentary maneuvering completed or perhaps eliminated the slow walking of the bill in the Senate. The petulance of the establishment GoP when they don’t get their way is remarkably consistent.
They could have gotten this done before early voting. They screwed around and are now using this as an excuse.
While I would have been happy for Clyburn to be gotten rid of, the SC legislature is largely moderate in their willingness to work together for the betterment of SC. The last thing we really need more than Clyburn to go away is for our legislature to become polarized like so much portrayed in media.
“work together for the betterment” compromising with the left usually doesnt work out well for civility
They are afraid of the black man
you mean the ones attacking them on the streets or authoring laws to destroy civility or the ones in the downy commercials who are doing the laundry and smelling the fresh breezes??
tia
Typical RINO two-step: (1) drag things out and then (2) claim that there’s no time. I recently moved out of Tom Davis’s SC district. I regret that I won’t be able to vote against him when he gets challenged in the primary. Plus as RITaxpayer says–yet another argument against voting seasons instead of Election Day.
We are talking about a State that keeps sending Lindsey Graham back to Washington every 6 years. It’s infested with demonrats posing as Republicans. We are talking about a State that let a family law firm run a 4 county area with an iron hand. It resulted in dead girl, possibly a dead young man and a father convicted of murdering his wife and the son who killed the girl. All to cover his embezzlement of clients settlements.
I live just outside of Charleston, SC, and have tried to follow this controversy closely. Our local paper, the Post and Courier, is generally a Democrat-leaning source and, as far as I’ve been able to see, has not reported how each of the SC senators voted on this matter. The Republicans who voted against the redistricting made a serious mistake by failing to improve the chances that the Republican Party will retain control of Congress. Their objections to such a sudden redistricting, when voting had already begun, had some merit, but these people apparently don’t understand the danger from the Left that our nation faces. I suspect many of these senators are near the end of their terms in office.
This is the complement to the Virginia case. There, the Democrats’ redistricting scheme was thrown out because they tried to pass the initial constitutional amendment in the middle of an election. In South Carolina, Republicans in the legislature have wisely declined to try to redistrict in the middle of an election — and saved the legislature from looking foolish when the courts threw it out.
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