A Statehouse parody of the nation’s ideals commemorated on Memorial Day

This is a more personal message than I usually write, as a national holiday and my own family history intersect with events at the Statehouse.

On Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, the General Assembly was in special session to debate further gerrymandering our congressional maps, even though primary election voting is well underway.

Memorial Day always reminds me of an uncle I never met: Rembert Dukes of Vance, S.C.

I didn’t meet him because he died before his 18th birthday in the World War II invasion of Sicily.

Although he was so very young, he insisted on volunteering when his older brother and sister did. They survived. He did not. He has no grave in the family plot at a small Methodist church outside Vance.

There was no body to bury; he rests forever in the Strait of Messina.

We often say that the people we commemorate on Memorial Day risked everything for our highest ideals.

I am certain that neither my uncle nor the people who grieved losing him for the rest of their lives would have felt that he died so that those who already hold power could silence everyone who disagrees with them in a winner-take-all parody of representative democracy.

His sacrifice cannot have been in aid of such a pathetic show as our current redistricting nightmare.

This is an attempt to pass H.5683, a bill developed in Washington, D.C. and designed to predetermine the outcome of our state’s congressional elections in favor of a 7 Republican and 0 Democrat delegation.

This plan is designed give more than 40% of the state’s people no voice in Washington.

The legislative process around this unusual mid-term redistricting effort has been convoluted and difficult.

There has been no time for the usual hearings around the state to obtain citizen input. The process at the Statehouse has been compressed to the breaking point and beyond.

There has been a complex interplay of House and Senate rules as the General Assembly attempts to do in several weeks what normally takes several years.

The House passed the legislation on May 20.

Now, the Senate has the bill and on Saturday gave it a favorable second reading. However, under Senate rules the necessary third and final vote cannot occur before Tuesday. We will not know until then, or even the day after, whether the bill has passed.

If it does, there will be court challenges, forcing election workers, candidates, and voters to proceed with no certainty of whether the change will survive court challenges.

This brings us to the effect on the election process itself. Under this bill all other primaries will occur as currently scheduled.

However, the congressional primary election date would become Aug. 18, pushing earlier election stages (candidate filing, absentee voting, early voting) earlier.

To make this happen, state and county election workers would have to conduct an unexpected election on short notice, something that the very experienced and capable director of the State Election Commission acknowledges will be very difficult.

All of this is in aid of adopting a map that is deeply flawed in intention and in execution.

Redistricting is supposed to respect communities that share social and economic interests, whenever possible also adhering to political boundaries. It should reflect the richness and diversity of our state’s people so that their voices can be heard clearly in Washington.

The map presented in this bill does none of this. It is designed only with the intention of allowing one party to win all seven congressional seats in our state.

Even that is done incompetently.

This map employs precinct boundaries that have changed over the years, so that some of the precincts that define it are not properly defined and some no longer exist.

All of this disruption, confusion, and cost is in the service of something that should never happen in a representative democracy.

This is an attempt to determine election outcomes in favor of only part of our state’s people before anyone casts a vote.

That is a betrayal of the highest ideals of our state and nation.

We should reflect on that while we celebrate this most sober of national holidays.