By Marilyn W. Thompson and Macon Atkinson
CHARLESTON — On paper, it seems simple to chop up, gut and eliminate South Carolina’s only Democratic-held — and Black majority — congressional seat.
Redraw the lines one way, and the Columbia base of incumbent Democrat U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn could be added into the safe Republican region covering Greenville.
Or shift the lines westward and Clyburn could end up having to face incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, famous for yelling “you lie” at President Barack Obama during a congressional address.
Another possibility is to take valuable portions of his district and share them with the state’s six other members of Congress — all Republicans — leaving Clyburn’s chances for re-election greatly weakened.
All you need to do is shuffle existing tracts of voters around, making sure there’s about 775,000 people (give or take a few thousand) in each of the state’s seven new congressional lines, but with the likely voter outcome of each seat stacked in your favor.
The above may be oversimplified, but Republicans in Texas and Democrats in California are moving to redraw their congressional district lines to be pro or con President Donald Trump. South Carolina could be next, where a far-right faction of the S.C. Legislature says it will introduce legislation to redraw the lines to give the GOP near-guaranteed control of all of the state’s congressional seats instead of its current six.
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Re-draws always controversial
The process would be far from swift.
“It's not as simple as being like, ‘Well, we want a 7-0 Republican plan, so we're just going to manifest it,’ ” Chaney said. Norman’s plan feels more like “political theater” than a real threat, he added, calling it a "dog and pony show that almost assuredly would be blocked in the court."
Norman’s proposal revives a racial argument that began in 1990, when the U.S. Justice Department ordered Southern states with discriminatory histories to give Black voters a fair chance to win representation.
Clyburn, reflecting on “the history of this country and redistricting,” said the state long ago was 60 percent African American, and to create a majority district, the state gerrymandered all Black voters from Beaufort up to Clyburn’s original hometown of Sumter into the same district. For 95 years, South Carolina’s delegation was completely White when nearly half the state’s voters were not.
Lynn Teague, co-president of the South Carolina League of Women Voters, acknowledged that Clyburn’s district “is very badly drawn so that CD-1 (Congressional District 1, held by Mace on the coast) could be gerrymandered. But that doesn't mean that CD-6 (held by Clyburn) is in itself an affront to the law or to ethics.”
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