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      In South Carolina, Black voters are split on immigration

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      Republicans claim that their election-year rhetoric about immigration has a new audience in Black communities. North Charleston’s newfound racial complexity tests that claim.The working-class city of about 120,000 people is one of the most strongly Democratic in South Carolina, more so even than Charleston, its larger, storied neighbor to its south. It has also long been split almost evenly between Black and white residents. Immigration has been adding a third dimension to what was a two-way relationship.In the “neck” of the barbell-shaped city, between the primarily white northern neighborhoods and the primarily Black southern neighborhoods, are stretches where the shops advertise in Spanish and almost all the children getting off the school bus are Latino.About 2.5% of North Charlestonians identified as Hispanic in the 1990 census. That rose to 4% in 2000, 10% in 2010 and, on paper, about 12% today, with 8% “other”. But the current census figures are questionable, said Enrique “Henry” Grace, CFO of the Charleston Hispanic Association: “Forget about it. Because Hispanics don’t do the census. Whatever the census says, double it.”Immigration can be a tough topic to discuss in South Carolina’s Black community, which isn’t keen on offering white conservatives who regularly attack cities as “crime-infested” yet another reason to snipe at North Charleston, especially in an election year when immigration rhetoric on the right has become increasingly toxic.But it doesn’t mean they aren’t asking more from Democratic leaders. In early June, Joe Biden announced changes to border policy, significantly curtailing asylum claims in a bid for bold executive action on a campaign issue.The US president’s border order came with political pressure mounting on the president and Congress to resolve negotiations on a bill to change America’s immigration policies and stem undocumented migration. Some of that political pressure comes from big-city leaders like the mayors of New York and Chicago, after border state governors began shipping people who had crossed the border to them last year, straining the social services infrastructure.But the border action has an audience among Democrats in South Carolina, too.Biden was serving red meat to Democratic party loyalists at a January campaign speech in Columbia, South Carolina, talking about his appointment of Black judges and lowering Black unemployment rates, when he threw them one nugget of red-state steak. He complained that Republicans in Congress were thwarting legislation on the border – despite getting almost everything they wanted in the bill – at the bidding of Donald Trump in order to preserve it for him as a political issue.View image in fullscreen“If that bill were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly,” Biden said, to applause.As attendees awaited the president before the speech, Michael Butler, mayor of Orangeburg, South Carolina, a Democrat, expressed sympathy with this idea. “I would expect the president, if he’s elected a second time, to close the border,” Butler said.The population of both the city and county of Orangeburg, about 45 minutes north of North Charleston, is mostly Black, poor, rural and Democratic. Biden won 70% of Orangeburg in the 2020 primary – his best showing statewide – and two-thirds of votes in the November election.Without a careful message, this time could be different. Shipping border crossers to big cities seemed like a publicity stunt, but it was one that worked, in Butler’s view, to highlight how problems at the border are problems everywhere, including Democratic strongholds.“I empathize with those mayors,” Butler said. “They have to deal with the expectations of migrants, and the security of them. You know we’re the land of the free and the brave, and we believe in taking care of all citizens. But those borders need to be secured to protect the citizens.”Butler’s take on immigration isn’t uniformly held across the state.Some Black political leaders in North Charleston beam about how immigration has changed their communities. State representative JA Moore, a North Charleston Democrat, boasts of having the most diverse district in the state. “I’m proud of that,” he said. Moore pushes back, hard, against the suggestion that there’s tension between Black and Latino people about housing or jobs where he lives.North Charleston presents a more nuanced test of the Black electorate’s reaction to immigration, because the growth of its immigrant community has come with booming economic growth and overall population increases. Even so, Moore admits that some could conflate something like the rapid increase in housing prices with the rapid increase in immigration.“The housing market in general and in Charleston is higher than it was 10, 15 years ago,” Moore said. “And also the amount of Hispanics that are moving in has increased tremendously in the past 15 years. They see a Hispanic person move into their neighborhood, and they’re seeing the prices of the houses going up … People may be correlating the two.”Donald Trump is counting on those kind of inferences.Biden’s Republican challenger, known for his increasingly strident immigration rhetoric, responded to the border closure at a rally in the Las Vegas heat after Biden’s announcement, describing it as insufficient while arguing that the president is “waging all-out war” on Black and Latino workers. He falsely claimed that the wages of Black workers had fallen 6% since 2021.The international manufacturers that have driven growth aren’t hiring undocumented labor, said Eduardo Curry, president of the North Charleston chapter of the Young Democrats of South Carolina. “A lot of jobs here in Charleston are skilled labor jobs,” he said. “It’s not just … walk off the street and let me hire you.”The problem, Curry said, is that too few Black workers in North Charleston have the training to take those jobs, even as those employers are yearning for more labor. Working-class Black laborers instead compete with recent immigrants for jobs that require less formal education.Tension between Black and Latino people in North Charleston has been relatively low, but may be rising because of job competition, said Ruby Wallace, a job recruiter at a staffing agency in North Charleston that serves warehouses and distribution centers – working-class employers. “Hispanics are working for whatever they can get at this point,” she said. “And they’re doing a lot of work.”The North Charleston native said her staffing agency has lost 40% of its business year over year after some clients found it less expensive to hire undocumented labor through shady organizations.The neighborhood around the staffing agency has become populated primarily with immigrants, and the office, which has historically employed working-class and poor Black people, turns away undocumented applicants every day.A cottage industry of undocumented labor has emerged, undercutting legal operators by skirting federal E-Verify laws and omitting payments into workers’ compensation and unemployment taxes.Wallace has been reporting the violations she sees to the US Department of Labor, to no avail. “I’m trying to figure out, how is it possible for them to load people up and bring them, working here in South Carolina? Is it not illegal for them to do that?” she said.Republican messaging aimed at Black voters mixes threats about job losses with invective about immigration, crime and cities.Black voters are expected to ignore the racial undercurrent of attacks on cities like Atlanta, Philadelphia or most recently Milwaukee – a “horrible city” in Trump’s most recent tirade – while being receptive to the idea that undocumented people from Central and South America make those cities more unsafe.That hasn’t happened in North Charleston.North Charleston began assessing the city’s racial disparity in arrests and victimization in 2020. A majority of North Charleston’s immigrants are Latino. According to a report released in 2021, Hispanic suspects represented about 7.5% of arrests, while Hispanic residents comprised 10% of the city’s population that year.Violent crime increased during the pandemic in North Charleston, as it did in most cities with more than 100,000 residents. It has fallen since. But it is among the higher-crime cities in the state, with a murder rate about five times the national average.Keeping the peace in North Charleston has meant navigating racial tension in a city experiencing poverty and crime. Immigration adds a new element to that challenge.Reggie Burgess, 58, grew up in North Charleston and served on its police force for more than 30 years – five as its chief – before winning election as the city’s first Black mayor in 2023. He said he contends with a common trope: that undocumented immigrants bring with them an uptick in crime.But that depiction of immigrants as criminals is false; they are measurably less likely to commit crimes than the US-born. Burgess, who has witnessed the changes in his community first-hand, said he has had to meet with immigrants to discuss how they are too often victimized by other poor people who look like him.Back when Burgess was still chief of police in 2017, he found himself conducting role-playing exercises with Latino immigrants about identifying Black people, trying to build some trust with the community.“We would actually turn them backwards, and we’d turn them around real quick and say: ‘Look at this person,’ and turn ’em back around,” Burgess said. “I’d ask, can you give me a description of the person? We were trying to teach them to understand that a Black male was more than this Afro. You’ve got to [describe] a shirt, or this lanyard.”It became evident to Burgess 20 years ago that undocumented individuals were being targeted for robberies because they tended to work in cash trades, he said. That revelation led the city to start pushing the financial-services industry to provide banking services, and was the start of relationship-building exercises between civic leaders and immigrants.But the federal government doesn’t do enough to keep victims from being deported long enough to sustain prosecutions, he said, leaving undocumented individuals as easy targets for crime and exploitation.“The U visa is supposedly supposed to help us lock in the witness for a period of time,” Burgess said, describing a victim witness visa program. “And Hispanics and Latinos would fill out the form, and I’m thinking: ‘OK, we’re good.’ The next thing you know, they tell me the prime witness has to go back or got caught up at a traffic stop and is being deported.”Underlying this issue is unstable housing and endemic poverty.“There’s a lot of need in Charleston in the Hispanic community. Need for everything, housing, jobs, everything,” said Grace of the Charleston Hispanic Association.The undocumented community in North Charleston tends to be concentrated in an area of the city with trailer parks and affordable housing. They are too often living in substandard or overcrowded conditions, said Annette Glover, who operates an immigrant-oriented community ministry in North Charleston.North Charleston is part of a three-county metropolitan area of about 830,000 residents. Glover’s organization, Community Impact, assisted 86,387 people within that area last year, she said, with food, language training, housing assistance and other help. Most were immigrants. About 75% – to 80% were undocumented, she said. With that has come a fear of appearing on the government’s radar, even while applying for help from nongovernmental organizations like hers, she said.“We have found a way to actually get them to fill out applications, by allowing them to understand that we’re not going to be giving it to Ice or to anything like that,” she said.Burgess said economic conditions and education are stress points. “I mean, some of these neighborhoods, the [adjusted median income] is $29,000. And then you can go a little further up, and AMI is probably is $101,000,” he said. “And without education, there’s no options. You have to settle for whatever you get.”The gridlock in Washington DC on immigration has an impact on places like North Charleston.Biden’s move to close the border to asylum seekers is a short-term approach to a long-term problem, Burgess said.Without actual reform to the immigration system, undocumented immigrants will remain in the shadows.“We have to step back and push aside these little personal vendettas and squabbles in these parties, and think as Americans,” Burgess said. “My people came here in chains 400 years ago. We’re free now, right? Why? We’re free because the country said enough is enough. And they fought, brothers and sisters, fought each other, and they said: ‘OK, everybody’s free.’ They could do that in 1865. They can do the same thing in 2024.” More

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      Nancy Mace beats Kevin McCarthy-backed challenger in South Carolina primary

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      The South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace easily survived a primary challenge on Tuesday, against Kevin McCarthy-backed Catherine Templeton, while a much closer than expected special election in Ohio offered warning signs for Republicans ahead of November.In Ohio’s sixth district, candidate Michael Rulli prevailed in the special election to replace fellow Republican Bill Johnson, who resigned from Congress in January. Rulli’s victory will help expand his party’s razor-thin majority in the House, but his nine-point win over Democratic contender Michael Kripchak may unnerve Republicans, given that Donald Trump carried the district by 29 points in 2020.In South Carolina, McCarthy, the former House speaker, attempted to oust Mace by backing her rival, but the the two-term incumbent received a crucial endorsement from Trump. The grudge match was personal for McCarthy, as Mace was one of the eight Republicans who voted to oust the then speaker last year.The high stakes made the race a costly one, with outside groups dumping millions of dollars into the district. The South Carolina Patriots Pac spent nearly $4m backing Templeton’s primary bid, while the Win It Back Pac and Club for Growth Action collectively invested roughly $2.5m supporting Mace. Despite Templeton’s external support, Mace led by 29 points when the Associated Press called the first congressional district race about an hour and a half after polls closed in South Carolina.Mace was not the only South Carolina Republican facing a primary threat on Tuesday. Over in the fourth district, the Republican congressman William Timmons was running neck and neck with state representative Adam Morgan, who leads the South Carolina legislature’s freedom caucus. Like Mace, Timmons had the benefit of Trump’s endorsement, but the race was still too close to call three hours after polls closed.And at least one of South Carolina’s House Republican primaries will advance to a runoff later this month. In the reliably Republican third district, Trump-backed pastor Mark Burns and Air National Guard Lt Col Sheri Biggs will compete again on 25 June to determine who will have the opportunity to succeed Jeff Duncan, the retiring representative.Meanwhile, the fate of South Carolina’s abortion laws rests in part on the results of three Republican primaries in state senate races. State senators Katrina Shealy, Margie Bright Matthews, Mia McLeod, Sandy Senn and Penry Gustafson collectively blocked a near-total abortion ban in South Carolina earlier this year. The “Sister Senators” were feted as a profile in courage by the Kennedy Center, but the three Republicans among them – Shealy, Senn and Gustafson – face primary challengers from their right on abortion. If two of the three lose to challengers, abortion foes will have the votes to restrict abortion beyond the current six-week ban.In addition to South Carolina, three other states held primaries on Tuesday. In Maine’s second congressional district, the former Nascar driver turned state representative Austin Theriault resoundingly defeated fellow state representative Michael Soboleski in the Republican primary. Theriault will advance to the general election against Democratic congressman Jared Golden, who faces yet another difficult re-election campaign.Republicans are hopeful that Theriault has the résumé to defeat Golden, but the Democrat has proven politically resilient since he was first elected to Congress in 2018, when he narrowly defeated the Republican incumbent, Bruce Poliquin, thanks to Maine’s ranked-choice voting system. In 2022, Golden again defeated Poliquin by six points in the second round of voting, even though Trump had carried the second district by seven points two years earlier.The Cook Political Report rates Golden’s seat as a toss-up, so Theriault’s victory will kick off what is expected to be a heated and closely contested race in the general election. Just minutes after the AP made Theriault’s primary win official, the left-leaning Pac American Bridge 21st Century began attacking him over his views on abortion access.In Nevada, a dozen Republicans are vying for their party’s Senate nomination, but the primary appears to have become a two-person race between the retired army captain Sam Brown and former US ambassador to Iceland Jeff Gunter. Polling indicates Brown has a significant lead over Gunter, and Brown has received a last-minute boost from Trump, who made a much-awaited endorsement in the race on Sunday.The winner of the Republican primary will go on to face the Democratic incumbent, Jackie Rosen, in one of the most closely watched Senate races this year, as the Cook Political Report rates the seat as a toss-up.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFurther down the ballot, the Democratic congresswoman Susie Lee faces a tough re-election campaign in Nevada’s third congressional district. Seven Republicans – including video game music composer Marty O’Donnell and former state treasurer Dan Schwartz – are running for the chance to face off against Lee, but Trump has stayed out of the primary so far. The former president’s only House primary endorsement in Nevada went to the former North Las Vegas mayor John Lee in the fourth district, but the winner of that race will face a much steeper climb to defeat the Democratic incumbent, Steven Horsford, in the general election.View image in fullscreenOver in North Dakota, five Republicans and two Democrats are running to replace the Republican congressman Kelly Armstrong representing the state’s at-large congressional district, but no Democrat has won the seat since 2008. Rather than seeking re-election, Armstrong has launched a gubernatorial bid, and he won his primary on Tuesday. Armstrong is widely favored to replace the outgoing governor, Doug Burgum, who has been named as a potential running mate for Trump.North Dakota voters also weighed in on a ballot measure regarding age limits for congressional candidates. If approved by a majority of North Dakota voters, the measure would prevent candidates from running for Congress if they would turn 81 during their term. Although the policy would only apply to congressional candidates, the age cutoff is noteworthy considering Joe Biden, who is four years older than Trump, turned 81 in November. More

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      Nancy Mace Defeats G.O.P. Challenger, Dealing Blow to McCarthy’s Revenge Tour

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      Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, on Tuesday defeated a well-funded primary challenger, putting her on track to win a third term. Her resounding victory also dealt a major blow to former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s efforts to exact political retribution against those who voted to oust him.Ms. Mace, 46, who once leaned center on social issues, won a Democratic seat in 2020 and claimed that all of former President Donald J. Trump’s accomplishments had been “wiped out” by his behavior on Jan. 6, 2021. But she has made a hard tack to the right over the past year as she has tried to game out her political future. The Associated Press declared her victory about two hours after polls closed on Tuesday.She was the unlikeliest of the eight rebel Republicans who voted to oust Mr. McCarthy last year, which transformed her from an ally into one of his top targets for revenge. Outside groups with ties to Mr. McCarthy, a California Republican, have poured more than $4 million into backing her opponent, Catherine Templeton, and attacking Ms. Mace.Ms. Mace said that effort motivated her to work harder.“I hope to embarrass him tonight,” she said earlier Tuesday over lunch at a Waffle House in Beaufort, between stops at polling locations. “I want to send him back to the rock he’s living under right now. He’s not part of America. He doesn’t know what hard-working Americans go through every single day. I hope I drive Kevin McCarthy crazy.”A spokesman for Mr. McCarthy declined to comment, and Ms. Mace did not mention his name in her victory speech on Tuesday night.Ms. Mace, whose back story as a former Waffle House waitress is a major part of her political biography, ordered her hash browns with confidence: scattered, diced, capped and peppered. Then she barely touched them.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Participant in Jan. 6 Riot Loses Primary Race in South Carolina

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      A 22-year-old who participated in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol lost his bid to unseat a Republican incumbent in the South Carolina House of Representatives.The defeat of Elias Irizarry in the state primary on Tuesday is the latest in a number of losses that riot participants have suffered at the ballot box in recent months. Most recently, Derrick Evans, a former West Virginia lawmaker who pleaded guilty to a felony for his role in the attack, was defeated in a Republican primary in May for a congressional seat there.Mr. Irizarry graduated last month from the Citadel, the esteemed public military college in Charleston, S.C. He was running in House District 43, a rural area in the northern part of the state. The incumbent, Randy Ligon, will not face a Democratic challenger in the general election, and will serve a fourth term in office.Mr. Irizarry was sentenced to 14 days in jail after pleading guilty to a trespassing charge related to his participation in the 2021 riot. He was suspended from the Citadel for a semester but was later reinstated after a federal judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, wrote a letter to the school stating that Mr. Irizarry had demonstrated “remorse and a determination to make amends.”Before his sentencing, Mr. Irizarry told Judge Chutkan that he was ashamed of his participation in the storming of the Capitol. But in the run-up to the election, his campaign website noted his prosecution for engaging in “nonviolent activities” at the Capitol as proof that he had “always stood for the conservative movement.”That reference to Jan. 6 disappeared from the website last week after The New York Times discussed it with Mr. Irizarry’s federal public defender. In a text message, Mr. Irizarry said he had initially mentioned his involvement in the riot on his website “for the sake of transparency.” More

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      House Ethics Panel Looks Into Nancy Mace’s Use of Reimbursement Program

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      The committee will decide whether to open a formal investigation into expense reports filed by the South Carolina Republican.The House Ethics Committee has begun reviewing Representative Nancy Mace’s use of a reimbursement program for lodging and other expenses of Congress members working in Washington, according to a committee member familiar with the preliminary inquiry.Following a complaint, lawmakers are being asked to look into whether Ms. Mace, Republican of South Carolina, overcharged the program thousands of dollars for expenses related to her Washington townhouse. According to the lawmaker familiar with the preliminary inquiry, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it, the full committee will consider the details of the complaint over the coming days.The committee has not taken a vote to authorize an investigation.A change to House rules that went into effect last year allows members to be repaid for costs of lodging and food while they are on official business in Washington, up to $34,000 a year. Lawmakers are not required to submit receipts to be reimbursed, but they are strongly encouraged to keep them for their records.According to the latest report by the Committee on House Administration, Ms. Mace was repaid more than $23,000 in lodging costs in 2023. Documents reviewed by The New York Times showed that amount included expenses for insurance, taxes and other monthly bills related to her townhouse. Lawmakers who own homes in the Washington area — as is the case for Ms. Mace — may not seek reimbursement for mortgage payments.Under the program, lawmakers may only request reimbursement for their portion of housing costs incurred while in Washington. But according to the deed of her home and a person familiar with Ms. Mace’s personal expenses, she is a partial owner of the home with her former fiancé, and would not be permitted to seek repayment for the full costs associated with the shared home.The discrepancies in her filings were first reported by The Washington Post, which noted that Ms. Mace was among a number of lawmakers whose total reimbursements were near the program’s maximum.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Supreme court rules South Carolina doesn’t need to redraw congressional map to consider Black voters

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      South Carolina Republicans do not need to redraw their congressional map, the US supreme court ruled on Thursday, saying that a lower court had not properly evaluated the evidence when it ruled that the lawmakers had discriminated against Black voters.In a 6-3 decision, the justices sent the case back to the lower court for further consideration. The decision, in Alexander v South Carolina Conference of the NAACP, is a major win for Republicans, who hold a slim margin in the US House with six of South Carolina’s seven congressional seats. It also could give lawmakers more leeway to discriminate in redistricting and use partisanship as a proxy for race. That could be enormously powerful in the US south, where voting is often racially polarized.“A party challenging a map’s constitutionality must disentangle race and politics if it wishes to prove that the legislature was motivated by race as opposed to partisanship. Second, in assessing a legislature’s work, we start with a presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” wrote Samuel Alito in an opinion that was joined by the court’s five other conservative justices.“The three-judge district court paid only lip service to these propositions. That misguided approach infected the district court’s findings of fact, which were clearly erroneous under the appropriate legal standard.”The dispute centered on the way the Republicans who control the state legislature redrew the state’s first congressional district after the 2020 census. After Nancy Mace narrowly was elected in 2020, they shifted the district’s boundaries to make it much friendlier to Republicans. As part of that effort, they moved 30,000 Black voters from Mace’s first district to the sixth, currently represented by Jim Clyburn, a Black Democrat. A lower court had ruled that lawmakers had impermissibly relied on race when they drew it after the 2020 census, saying they had to redraw the district.The case had dragged on for so long, however, that the lower court and the supreme court recently allowed South Carolina to use the district for this year’s election.Mac Deford, an attorney challenging Mace, observed oral arguments in person. Deford said he watched Chief Justice John Roberts wrestle with the connection between race and politics.“From my viewpoint, there was some signaling that they were going to draw some sort of line between race and politics. And I think that they did in this case,” Deford said, noting how in the earlier decision Shelby v Holder Roberts had proposed the idea that southern legislators had long abandoned heavy-handed racial discrimination in voting.“This could be sort of setting the stage for a subsequent case, maybe next year, that could be brought on the Voting Rights Act that could further strip away the vote.”The challengers in the case, the South Carolina branch of the NAACP and a South Carolina voter, argued that those actions violated the 14th amendment’s ban on sorting voters based on race. South Carolina Republicans argued that they were motivated by partisanship, not race.In 2019, the supreme court said that there was nothing federal courts could do to stop gerrymandering based on partisanship. Sorting voters based on race, however, still remains unlawful. This was the first case that came to the court since its 2019 decision, forcing the justices to clarify their standard when the two issues are intermingled.The lower court had relied on a trove of evidence and experts that the challengers offered to conclude that South Carolina Republicans were sorting voters based on their race. One of those experts used an algorithm to draw 20,000 maps that didn’t take race into account but complied with traditional redistricting criteria. But Alito and the other conservative justices said that evidence was not good enough.Alito zeroed in on the fact that the challengers in the case had not offered an alternative map that achieved the partisan goals of Republican lawmakers – a safe Republican district – and that also had a higher Black voting age population as the challenged district. Such a map, he wrote, was critical to proving that South Carolina Republicans had considered race above other considerations.“Without an alternative map, it is difficult for plaintiffs to defeat our starting presumption that the legislature acted in good faith,” he wrote.That rationale drew a sharp rebuke from Elena Kagan, who accused the majority of getting the decision “seriously wrong” and inventing “a new rule of evidence”.“As of today, courts must draw an adverse inference against those plaintiffs when they do not submit a so-called alternative map – no matter how much proof of a constitutional violation they otherwise present,” the liberal justice wrote in an opinion. “Such micro-management of a plaintiff ’s case is elsewhere unheard of in constitutional litigation. But as with its upside-down application of clear-error review, the majority is intent on changing the usual rules when it comes to addressing racial-gerrymandering claims.”Kagan went on to outline how Thursday’s decision would give states much more leeway to enact discriminatory maps and voting policies.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“In every way, the majority today stacks the deck against the challengers. They must lose, the majority says, because the state had a ‘possible’ story to tell about not considering race – even if the opposite story was the more credible,” Kagan wrote in the opinion, which was joined by the court’s two other liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.“When racial classifications in voting are at issue, the majority says, every doubt must be resolved in favor of the state, lest (heaven forfend) it be ‘accus[ed]’ of ‘offensive and demeaning’ conduct.”Leah Aden, a lawyer at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund who argued the case on behalf of the plaintiffs at the supreme court in October, said the decision “usurps the authority of trial courts to make factual findings of racial discrimination as the unanimous panel found occurred with South Carolina’s design of congressional district 1”. She said the challengers would continue to fight to redraw the map at the lower court.Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Alito and the court majority had “once again come up with a legal framework that makes it easier for Republican states to engage in redistricting to help white Republicans maximize their political power”.“He did so by reversing the burden of proof that should apply in these cases in two ways to favor these states: pushing a ‘presumption of good faith’ and raising the evidentiary burdens for those challenging the maps,” he wrote on his blog.Clarence Thomas, a conservative justice, also wrote a lengthy separate concurring opinion in the case saying that federal courts should not be involved in policing constitutional claims of racial discrimination in redistricting – a radical idea that would be a break with the court’s longstanding jurisprudence. “It behooves us to abandon our misguided efforts and leave districting to politicians,” he wrote. The concurrence was not joined by any of the other justices.Joe Biden also criticized the decision in a statement Thursday afternoon.“The Supreme Court’s decision today undermines the basic principle that voting practices should not discriminate on account of race and that is wrong,” he said. “This decision threatens South Carolinians’ ability to have their voices heard at the ballot box, and the districting plan the Court upheld is part of a dangerous pattern of racial gerrymandering efforts from Republican elected officials to dilute the will of Black voters.”George Chidi contributed reporting More

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      Supreme Court Sides With Republicans Over South Carolina Voting Map

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      The case concerned a constitutional puzzle: how to distinguish the roles of race and partisanship in drawing voting maps when Black voters overwhelmingly favor Democrats.The Supreme Court cleared the way on Thursday for South Carolina to keep using a congressional map that a lower court had deemed an unconstitutional racial gerrymander that resulted in the “bleaching of African American voters” from a district.The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s three liberal members in dissent.A unanimous three-judge panel of the Federal District Court in Columbia, S.C., ruled in early 2023 that the state’s First Congressional District, drawn after the 2020 census, violated the Constitution by making race the predominant factor.The panel put its decision on hold while Republican lawmakers appealed to the Supreme Court, and the parties asked the justices to render a decision by Jan. 1. After that deadline passed, the panel said in March that the 2024 election would have to take place under the map it had rejected as unconstitutional.“With the primary election procedures rapidly approaching, the appeal before the Supreme Court still pending and no remedial plan in place,” the panel wrote, “the ideal must bend to the practical.”In effect, the Supreme Court’s inaction had decided the case for the current election cycle.The contested district, anchored in Charleston, had elected a Republican every year since 1980, with the exception of 2018. But the 2020 race was close, with less than one percentage point separating the candidates, and Republican lawmakers “sought to create a stronger Republican tilt” in the district after the 2020 census, the panel wrote.The lawmakers achieved that goal, the panel found, in part by the “bleaching of African American voters out of the Charleston County portion of Congressional District No. 1.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      South Carolina mulls mystery $1.8bn in account: ‘We don’t know why it’s there’

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      To put it mildly, the South Carolina state government faces an unusual problem: what to do about $1.8bn found in a state bank account when no one knows how it got there, how it should be spent or even whether it really exists.Discussing the problem, the Republican governor, Henry McMaster, made a play for political understatement of the year.“There’s something wrong somewhere,” McMaster told reporters, adding: “We don’t know why it’s there, what it’s supposed to be used for, how long it’s been there – that’s a problem.”Last year, the state comptroller resigned after the discovery of a 10-year, $3.5bn accounting error. State lawmakers say the $1.8bn sum could be related to that scandal, the New York Times reported. Or it may not be. No one knows.Working out the truth is not proving easy, particularly because the new comptroller, Brian Gaines, a Democrat, is fighting with the state treasurer, Curtis Loftis Jr, a Republican, over where the $1.8bn came from and what to do about it.State officials say the sum was discovered last October – though the state auditor, George Kennedy III, recently told a hearing he knew about it in 2017 but presumed it was in the account temporarily, the Times said.This week, Larry Grooms, a state senator, told News19, a CBS affiliate in Columbia: “The governor appointed a new comptroller. The new comptroller trying to close the books alerted us to what appeared to be something wrong with one account within our state’s finances.“Out of thousands of thousands of accounts, here’s one account with $1.8bn associated with it.“Having $1.8bn in an account that’s supposed to be zero tells us that something is clearly wrong with our state’s accounting and the problems aren’t solved.“The state treasurer’s office operates a bank. He’s like our state’s chief banker. The comptroller general is our state’s chief accountant. Right now we know the bank has so much money in it. No one disputes how much cash we have. But what’s in dispute is what accounts those monies belong [to].”On Wednesday, at a public hearing, Loftis said the problem “got dumped on us because of the failure of [the comptroller’s] office. We are reconstructing the books as best we can over the last seven years, and nobody will give us information.”But Gaines told News19 it was the treasurer’s responsibility to track balances in government accounts, then told the Times: “The treasurer believes his own PR, which flies in the face of evidence. Every treasurer for 80 years or more has been able to reconcile cash, including Treasurer Loftis until 2016.”The Wednesday hearing produced exchanges that, as the Times said, verged on the existential. A senator, Tom Young Jr, asked Loftis if he was “sure [the $1.8bn] exists?”Loftis said: “We believe that to be the case.”Grooms said: “We believe that it is real cash, but we have not been able to prove that it is real cash … That’s a real problem if your banker can’t certify if you have $1.8bn or not. It’s a problem if the banker can’t tell you whose money it is.”Nonetheless, Grooms said, “Everyone wants a piece” of the possibly phantom $1.8bn.“You’ll have the house and senate fighting over how to appropriate it,” Grooms said, whether for “taxpayer rebates, highway construction, new school construction” or other uses.In his session with reporters last week, McMaster counseled caution on spending the money – if it actually exists – too soon.The situation “does not inspire confidence”, the governor said, “but the good news is no money was lost. No money was stolen. The question is, what to do with it …“One thing I would say is, ‘Let’s don’t rush out and spend that money, there is a lot of money, there’s no need to hurry up and try to spend money. We don’t know where it was supposed to go, what [its] purpose was supposed to be, anything else at this point. I think we need to find that out. But it’s a blow to confidence. But we get better after things like this.”Asked about the feud between the treasurer and the comptroller, McMaster said: “I recommend a cup of coffee. That always seems to do the trick. I think these are grown men and they have staffs. This is a serious question for all the people.” More