Senate vote shows a new SC congressional map can’t become law before early voting starts

COLUMBIA — South Carolina senators failed Friday to muster the votes necessary for finalizing a new congressional map before early voting begins for party primaries, but debate on the White House-backed map continued.

Supporters needed two-thirds majority approval — at least 31 votes — to void their own redistricting rules and start voting on the bill.

The 25-15 vote fell six votes short, as six Republicans joined Democrats in opposing the rushed process. The count also indicates supporters are one vote short of limiting debate through an existing rule that becomes an option Saturday. Even if they pick up a vote to push that through, debate could continue for up to 46 hours before the Senate actually votes on the bill.

“If you can’t suspend the rules, the earliest the Senate could pass something is when you have tens of thousands of people standing in line to vote already,” Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, among the “no” votes, told reporters.

He contends it’s already too late to upend an election that’s already underway and void part of ballots already cast.

As of Friday, 12,695 absentee ballots had been mailed for the June 9 primary. The state Election Commission has received 320 ballots back from active military members overseas and 3,153 additional from other absentee voters.

“We’re trying to pull something off that we just never had time to do from the outset,” said Massey, R-Edgefield.

He was among five Republicans who helped kill a resolution to put redistricting on the agenda of a special session. That May 12 vote seemed to end the push.

But after the regular session ended two days later, Gov. Henry McMaster ordered legislators to keep working in a special session. A change in the House rules Monday allowed that chamber’s ruling Republicans to wrap up voting after midnight Tuesday.

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Even some supporters of the effort expressed hesitancy to let debate bleed into the start of in-person early voting.

“Understand where we are right now,” Sen. Larry Grooms, who made the motion to suspend the rules, told his colleagues after it failed.

He urged senators not to make any changes in the bill, no matter how long it takes to get through the process, since that would require the House to vote again.

“South Carolinians will go to their early voting places on Tuesday morning,” said the Berkeley County Republican. “They will push the buttons on a voting machine.”

But supporters ultimately weren’t willing to call it quits on mid-decade redistricting.

Following a Senate GOP huddle on what to do next, Grooms told reporters some Republicans thought it was important to continue to “show the folks back home” they were putting in the work and debating the issue.

Grooms said he will try again Saturday to suspend the rules.

Should the bill ultimately become law, a lawsuit on its timing is guaranteed, potentially blocking the law from taking effect for the primaries anyway. Opponents say it’s not the U.S. Supreme Court that supporters need to worry about. It’s the state Supreme Court.

“If you’re looking for pitfalls, there’s plenty of arguments to make at the (state) Supreme Court already,” Massey said after the Senate’s first day of debate on the bill ended Thursday.

The effort to redraw South Carolina’s lines to create seven Republican seats followed a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that threw out Louisiana’s congressional map, striking down a majority-Black congressional district as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.

Supporters say it’s now necessary to “un-gerrymander” the 6th District, held by Democrat U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn since voters first elected him in 1992.

But opponents contend the Louisiana ruling doesn’t apply to South Carolina’s map.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld South Carolina’s voting lines in 2024, ruling the gerrymandering between the 1st and 6th districts were done for partisan, not racial, reasons. Basically, justices ruled it was OK for the GOP-ruled Legislature to draw lines that gave Republicans the advantage in the coastal 1st District. They did that by moving Democrat-heavy precincts into the 6th District, keeping that seat reliably blue.

After the ruling from the nation’s high court, the South Carolina chapters of the League of Women Voters and American Civil Liberties Union sued in state court, arguing that partisan gerrymandering violated the state constitution.

The justices ultimately disagreed in a unanimous ruling last September.

However, it came with a warning from Chief Justice John Kittredge.

“Future claims of excessive partisan gerrymandering” may not meet constitutional muster, “thereby warranting judicial intervention,” he wrote in a separate opinion that made clear justices weren’t categorically condoning partisan gerrymandering.

He also wrote that the Legislature’s redistricting authority under the state constitution hinges on the action being “wise and proper.”

“They clearly were concerned about this exact scenario,” Massey told reporters, while holding a copy of the decision.

“The process has to matter,” he added. “If the process mattered three years ago and it’s going to matter three years from now it has to matter today, too.”