Opinion: S.C. Move to Delay Primaries an Ugly Portrait of Political Pandering
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
The South Carolina House Panel’s move on Friday to push for a two-month delay for the scheduled June 9 primaries to allow time to redistrict per request from the White House is unwise and unconstitutional.
Only a few days after the United States Supreme Court’s decision Louisiana to redraw districts, essentially killing the 1965 Voting Rights Act, South Carolina seems poised to eliminate the one Black voice in its delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives, longtime U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, echoing the words of George Wallace standing on the steps of the University of Alabama and Lester Maddox handing out pickaxes to the KKK, had this to say in defense of the decision: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
A legislature that redraws districts to serve political partisanship while ignoring ethnic communities is not merely playing hardball; it is converting the machinery of representation into a private joke. The joke, of course, is on the voters. What begins as a map-making exercise ends as a theory of citizenship, and in this theory some people are counted only when their votes can be split, muted, or neatly packed away where they will do the least possible harm to power.
The constitutional problem is not subtle. The point of representative government is that voters choose their officials, not that officials arrange voters into obedient little collections and then congratulate themselves on the outcome. When district lines are drawn to maximize partisan advantage, and especially when they do so by shredding communities with shared ethnic identity, the state is not administering democracy, but editing it. And when the editing has a predictable effect of weakening minority communities’ ability to elect representatives of their choice or to influence public life at all, the practice begins to look less like governance than discrimination with a cartographer’s pen.
Ethnic communities are not decorative features on a demographic chart. They are living neighborhoods, commercial corridors, churches, unions, family networks, and histories that do not dissolve just because a consultant has found a more efficient electoral arrangement. To treat them as disposable is to announce that politics matters more than people, and that the lines on a map matter more than the lives lived within them. That is precisely backward. The law’s dignity depends on the opposite premise: that communities exist before the state classifies them, and that representation ought to recognize their reality rather than pulverize it for convenience.
There is also the small matter of legitimacy, which is not usually mentioned by those who benefit from these arrangements because it has an inconvenient habit of lingering. A district drawn in bad faith may be legal in the narrowest imaginable sense for a time, but it is constitutionally corrosive. It teaches citizens that the system is rigged before the campaign begins, that elections are performances staged inside boundaries selected to produce a preferred ending. Once that belief takes hold, public confidence does not merely dip; it becomes embarrassed into silence.
The constitutional order cannot be expected to survive indefinitely on cynicism and clerical ingenuity. If the state may redraw lines to favor one party while ignoring the coherence of ethnic communities, then it has turned representation into a form of controlled access. That is not a republic; it is an arrangement. And arrangements, unlike constitutions, are made to be broken.
If it passes in South Carolina, as now seems increasingly likely, it will represent more than a procedural setback. It will mark a substantial step backward for the state and add yet another stain to a long history of racial discrimination and the marginalization of minority communities.
South Carolina’s past is not easily separated from the politics of exclusion. In the years before the Civil War, the state stood at the ideological center of the Confederacy and became the first to secede from the Union, issuing a declaration that made plain its defense of slavery and its resentment of states that opposed it. In the decades that followed, politicians such as Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman built careers on white supremacy, and under his influence the state rewrote its 1895 constitution to strip Black citizens of the vote through poll taxes, literacy tests, and other devices meant to make citizenship conditional. Black voter registration collapsed accordingly.
That pattern continued through the Jim Crow era, when segregation governed nearly every corner of public life and racial terror was used to reinforce it. South Carolina’s record included not only the daily humiliations of “White Only” signs on fountains, bathrooms, restaurants, and storefronts, but also the violence that lay beneath them: lynchings, intimidation, and the ordinary cruelty of a system built to enforce racial hierarchy. Even where the state did not experience the level of open disorder seen elsewhere in the South, it was not spared the uglier forms of official force. The shooting at South Carolina State University in 1968, when Highway Patrol officers fired on Black students protesting segregation, killing three and wounding many more, remains among the most searing examples.
The modern era has not erased that history so much as layered it with new forms of contestation. For decades, civil rights advocates fought to remove the Confederate battle flag from the State House grounds, a struggle that ended only after the massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston in 2015, when a white supremacist murdered nine Black worshippers. That moment made plain what many in the state had long understood: the past is not the past in South Carolina, but an active force in public life.
Against that backdrop, any attempt to manipulate elections in order to serve partisan aims at the expense of fair representation should be understood for what it is: not a technical adjustment, but another act in a familiar drama of exclusion. Voters should recognize it accordingly and answer it at the ballot box with the clearest possible rejection.
