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Former South Carolina Democratic congressional candidate Andy Brack has a column out this week parroting some tired old talking points from the Palmetto State’s “progressive” establishment on the issue of redistricting.
For those of you unfamiliar with redistricting, it is the decennial process by which electoral borders are reconfigured – purportedly based on the latest population data from the U.S. Census. Sadly, in South Carolina this process is governed exclusively by politics – something my media outlet has been railing on for years.
“Decisions regarding citizen representation are central to the integrity of our representative democracy – and they must be made based on hard data, not political deal-making,” I noted in a column on the issue back in 2019.
Anyway, Brack would have you believe such political deal-making is the exclusive purview of so-called “Republicans.”
In his latest column, Brack chided the U.S. supreme court for asking questions about South Carolina’s most recent congressional redistricting – which is currently the focus of a federal lawsuit. The court heard oral arguments in this case on Wednesday, and seems inclined to rule in favor of the state based on the questions posed by the justices.
According to Brack, this is a “fix.”
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“The way that justices posed questions Wednesday about whether the first congressional district in South Carolina was unconstitutionally gerrymandered makes it look like the fix is in,” Brack wrote. “They may be poised to side with arguments that how South Carolina legislators jiggered district lines was OK.”
Jiggered?
According to Brack, “what our state’s elected Republican leaders did” was wrong – and by implication racist. Specifically, he accused these GOP leaders of “bleaching” the Palmetto State’s first district, which is represented by second term congresswoman Nancy Mace.
“It ain’t too hard to see how moving 30,000 black voters sounds like a pretty good tip of the hat for race, not politics, being the deciding factor,” Brack wrote.
Brack’s column also quoted Democratic congressional candidate Michael B. Moore – who accused the GOP of “marginalizing one bloc of voters to benefit another, and maintaining unearned political power by whatever means necessary.”
“More than 30,000 black voters were unconstitutionally removed from (the first district),” Moore tweeted earlier this week.
(Click to View)
Okay … but removed by whom?
Far be it from me to defend South Carolina “Republicans.” The outcomes they have produced for the Palmetto State in the two decades since they assumed power – diminished prosperity, workforce contraction, academic erosion, systemic injustice and an ongoing infrastructure collapse – are indefensible.
Especially in light of the obscene rates at which they have grown government …
But when it comes to redrawing political lines to maintain “unearned political power by whatever means necessary,” I must remind South Carolinians that the GOP has had a more-than-willing accomplice in its anti-democratic gerrymandering.
“The creation of anti-competitive, majority-minority districts in South Carolina has been a bipartisan, biracial undertaking for decades … not to mention a mutually beneficial one for the politicians with the sharpies in their hands,” I noted last fall.
Previously, this news outlet penned a lengthy story discussing the extent to which powerful U.S. congressman Jim Clyburn was manipulating this process to his personal advantage – conspiring with GOP leaders to draw political boundaries that protected his political fiefdom in the Palmetto State’s dirt-poor sixth congressional district.
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Clyburn and his GOP allies have been definitionally undermining democratic representation in the name of political deal-making for years – even as Clyburn repeatedly (and publicly) washed his hands of the maps purportedly drawn by those “racist” Republicans.
“In South Carolina, redistricting is done by the Legislature,” Clyburn wrote in a 2018 letter to the editor of The (Columbia, S.C.) State newspaper. “Any gerrymandering of election districts is the product of the Republican-controlled General Assembly.”
Earlier this year, the mainstream press finally caught on … or at least one other member of the Fourth Estate did.
Reporter Marylin W. Thompson of ProPublica penned the definitive take on Clyburn’s unseemly role in this process.
“Facing the possibility of an unsafe district, South Carolina’s most powerful Democrat sent his aide to consult with the GOP on a redistricting plan that diluted black voting strength and harmed his party’s chances of gaining seats in Congress,” Thompson noted.
That’s right …
“His once majority black district had suffered a daunting exodus of residents since the last count,” Thompson continued. “He wanted his seat to be made as safe as possible.”
And he did …
(Click to View)
Clyburn’s aide presented GOP leaders with “a hand-drawn map” of the sixth congressional district – one which “added black voters … while moving out some predominantly white precincts that leaned toward the GOP,” according to Thompson.
In other words, Clyburn did exactly what I said he was doing at the time …
“Not only was Clyburn determined to surrender precisely none of his black voters, he made it abundantly clear he would be corralling even more of them into his fiefdom – making it even harder for Democrats to compete in surrounding districts,” I noted in November 2021.
Which, again, is exactly what he did.
In his article assailing the supreme court’s deliberations on these matters, Brack made no mention of Clyburn’s starring role in the scam. Nor did Moore make any mention of it when he stood on the steps of the court and accused GOP leaders of generational racism. Also, with the exception of Thompson and ProPublica, no mainstream media has made mention of it, either.
Apparently if Democrats and their media mouthpieces ignore Clyburn’s central role in this assault on competitive elections, then it never happened.
The problem? It did … whether any of them will admit it or not.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR …
Will Folks is the founding editor of the news outlet you are currently reading. Prior to founding FITSNews, he served as press secretary to the governor of South Carolina. He lives in the Midlands region of the state with his wife and seven (soon to be eight) children.
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4 comments
Totally nauseating and irresponsible for a “journalist” of ANY political ilk to post such racist fiction.
Ol’ Enos should look at how his district is drawn sometime. He should be spending more time figuring out how his girls are going to keep their cushy federal jobs once he does his Feinstein imitation.
I can’t speak for SC, but DC is screwing with Alabama by trying to create (basically mandate) another Democrat district & seat in Congress by rubbing out one of our Republican districts. They, of course, are claiming that the way our districts stand are racist. What they’re actually doing is reverse racism. The DOJ did the same thing to Huntsville with school districts. I could go on for days about this, but it is disturbing & infringes upon States rights-to say the least.
Sorry, but your districts are racist. They were set up by Republicans to minimize to the extent possible the influence of black voters in elections. Your state has always tried to suppress minority representation whenever it has been given a chance, first by violence, then by poll taxes and reading tests; and finally by tricks like racist districting. You’re just the same ole Alabama you have been for the past 100 years. Over the decades the parties switched places, it used to be the Democrats and then the racists all moved to the Republican party, so now it’s the Republicans; but in the end, it’s the same old racist groups doing the same things to the same people to stay in power. It’s why the Voting Rights Act was enacted in the first place, and when the SCOTUS cut back on the protections it offered minorities, the same old offenders went right back to their same old ways. Your state is not alone in that, but that does not make it not true.
Oh I wish was in the land of cotton ole times there are not forgotten.