South Carolina

Subterms

    More stories

    • 188 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

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

      by

      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

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Supreme Court Sides With Republicans Over South Carolina Voting Map

      by

      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

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

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

      by

      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

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      South Carolina Republicans can use discriminatory map for 2024, court rules

      by

      A federal court will allow South Carolina Republicans to use their congressional map for the 2024 election, it said on Thursday, despite an earlier finding that the same plan discriminates against Black voters. The decision is a big win for Republicans, who were aided by the US supreme court’s slow action on the case.In January 2023, a three-judge panel struck down the state’s first congressional district, which is currently represented by Nancy Mace, a Republican. The judges said legislative Republicans had impermissibly used race when they redrew it after the 2020 census. As part of an effort to make it more solidly Republican, lawmakers removed 30,000 Black voters from the district into a neighboring one. Republicans argued that they moved the voters to achieve partisan ends, which is legal. The district was extremely competitive in 2020, but Mace easily won the redrawn version in 2022.The ruling is a significant boon to House Republicans, who are trying to keep a razor-thin majority in Congress’s lower chamber this year.The US supreme court heard oral arguments in the case, Alexander v South Carolina Conference of the NAACP, on 11 October and seemed poised allow the GOP map to remain in place. But the court has not yet issued a decision. The justices still could potentially order the state to come up with a new map before the 2024 election, though that seems less likely as the state’s 11 June primary approaches. The supreme court has adopted in recent years an idea called the Purcell principle in which it does not disrupt maps or election practices as an election nears.“A second election under an infirm map is justice delayed when plaintiffs have made every effort to get a decision and remedy before another election under a map that denies them their rights,” said Leah Aden, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who argued the case at the supreme court last year. “As with any civil rights struggle, we will be unrelenting in our fight for our constitutional rights.”South Carolina officials had asked the supreme court to issue a ruling by 1 January 2024 in order to have a resolution ahead of the state’s primary.Lawyers representing state officials had recently started arguing that South Carolina’s June congressional primary was fast approaching so the state should be allowed to use the old map.At the request of South Carolina Republicans, the trial court said they did not have to come up with a new map until 30 days after a final decision from the supreme court. But, it added “on the outside chance the process is not completed in time for the 2024 primary and general election schedule, the election for Congressional District No 1 should not be conducted until a remedial plan is in place”.The three-judge panel acknowledged on Thursday that what it once considered unlikely had now come to fruition. It acknowledged the difficulty of coming up with a new map ahead of the upcoming primary. Overseas and military ballots must be sent out by 27 April for the state’s 11 June primary.“Having found that Congressional District No 1 constitutes an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, the Court fully recognizes that ‘it would be the unusual case in which a court would be justified in not taking appropriate action to insure that no further elections are conducted under an invalid plan,’” the panel wrote. “But with the primary election procedures rapidly approaching, the appeal before the Supreme Court still pending, and no remedial plan in place, the ideal must bend to the practical.”The case is the most recent example of how litigants have been able to take advantage of the Purcell principle. By dragging out cases as long as possible, Republicans have been able to keep discriminatory maps and election practices in place for additional elections.In a brief to the supreme court earlier this week, the plaintiffs in the case said that it would be inappropriate for the justices to allow South Carolina to use its map for another election.“Contrary to Defendants’ pleas, thirteen full months of legislative inaction does not warrant a stay. There is still time to draft and enact a remedial plan for the 2024 congressional elections,” they wrote. “Defendants offer no explanation for why they did not expeditiously request the relief they now seek last year, or even in January or February of 2024. Nor do Defendants explain why they have not yet begun legislative proceedings to enact contingent remedial plans, as other states have done in response to judicial rulings.” More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Family Settles in Battle for Ancestral Land in South Carolina

      by

      Josephine Wright, who died this year at 94, had been fighting to save family property. The developer, Bailey Point Investments, agreed to end the dispute, the family’s lawyer said.The family of a woman who fought a developer to keep their ancestral land in Hilton Head, S.C., has reached a settlement in the legal battle that recognized her ownership, a family lawyer said this week.Josephine Wright, who died in January at 94, had been leading the fight to retain rights to the land that had been in her husband’s family since the Civil War. Her quest had drawn support from celebrities, including Snoop Dogg and Kyrie Irving.The company that owns the development neighboring her property, Bailey Point Investment, had sued Ms. Wright in February 2023, claiming encroachment. The company said that her satellite dish, shed and screened porch trespassed on its land, which had “significantly delayed and hindered” development.The two parties had agreed on the terms of a settlement before Ms. Wright died in January, but the documents were not signed, so they had to wait until it was determined who would be authorized to sign on behalf of her estate, Roberts Vaux, the family’s lawyer said in an email.Mr. Vaux declined to provide details of the settlement, but said that the land that Ms. Wright claimed is “confirmed as hers.”A lawyer representing Bailey Point Investment did not immediately respond to requests for comment.A family spokeswoman, Altimese Nichole, told South Carolina Public Radio that the settlement requires that Bailey Point Investment stop contacting the family about acquiring the land and that it fix a roof on the property, put up a privacy fence and provide landscaping.Ms. Wright had previously told The New York Times that her husband inherited the 1.8-acre property from his parents, and that it was put in her name after he died in 1998.The property has been a gathering spot for Ms. Wright’s seven children, 40 grandchildren, 50 great-grandchildren and 16 great-great-grandchildren, she had said.Ms. Wright’s predicament, however, wasn’t all that unique among residents of Hilton Head, S.C., an island 100 miles from Charleston, S.C.Land in the area was owned by many Black families who had settled there long before developers arrived in the 1950s and made it a tourist destination, Mel Campbell, 75, a community elder previously told the Times. Many of the Black families were descendants of West and Central Africans who were enslaved and worked on rice, indigo and cotton plantations.Many families were offered large checks from developers for their land, Ms Wright said. She said that she had refused when she was offered $39,000 for the land years ago.Ms. Wright told The Times in August that the land’s value was not only monetary. “It’s a family thing,” she said then, “and we want to keep it that way forever.” More

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Six out of 10 South Carolina Republican primary voters think Biden wasn’t legitimately elected

      by

      More than 60% of South Carolina Republican primary voters said they don’t believe Joe Biden was legitimately elected, according to exit polls, the latest data point that underscores how election denialism has become a mainstream belief in the Republican party.Eighty-seven percent of those who don’t believe the US president was legitimately elected supported Donald Trump, according to a CNN exit poll of South Carolina primary voters. Just 12% supported Nikki Haley. Among those who believe Biden legitimately won in 2020, the results were nearly flipped 81% supported Haley, while 19% supported the former president.Several studies, investigations and audits have found no widespread fraud that affected the outcome of the 2020 election.The results are consistent with exit polls of the Republican primary electorate in other states. A total of 51% of New Hampshire primary voters said Biden was not legitimately elected, according to a CNN exit poll during the primary last month. In Iowa, two-thirds of Iowa caucus-goers said Biden’s election was not legitimate.A national January poll from USA Today/Suffolk University found two-thirds of those supporting Trump didn’t believe Biden was legitimately elected.The polling comes as Trump has not backed an inch away from the lie that he won in 2020. Even though several studies and investigations have debunked Trump’s baseless claims of fraud, he has continued to warn about the possibility of fraud, laying the possible groundwork to claim another stolen election in 2024. All of that rhetoric has helped somewhat normalize the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSouth Carolina exit polls also further illustrate Trump’s continued political appeal despite the mounting criminal charges he has wracked up. Sixty-one percent of primary voters said he was fit to serve as president, even if he was convicted of a crime. Ninety percent of those who said he was fit supported Trump. More

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Trump soundly defeats Nikki Haley in South Carolina Republican primary – video

      by

      Donald Trump defeated Nikki Haley in her home state of South Carolina, a stinging setback that narrows her vanishingly thin path to the nomination. The Associated Press called the South Carolina primary for Trump when polls closed at 7pm, in a clear indication of his margin of victory. Trump locked in about 60% of the vote, with Haley hovering at about 40%. South Carolina voters have a long history of choosing the party’s eventual nominee, and Trump is on track to clinch the Republican nomination months before the party’s summer convention in Milwaukee. ‘I just want to say that I have never seen the Republican party so unified as it is right now,’ Trump told supporters at his victory party in Columbia, the state capital. ‘This is a fantastic evening. It’s an early evening, and fantastic.’ More

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      After South Carolina, Trump’s March to the Nomination Quickens

      by

      The reality has been clear for weeks, since former President Donald J. Trump trounced his opponents across the frozen fields and icy highways of Iowa. But his overwhelming victory on Saturday in South Carolina, where he defeated Nikki Haley in her home state, makes it all but official.The Republican nominating contest isn’t a competition. It’s a coronation.The party primaries this winter represented the best chance for Republicans who were opposed to the former president to oust him from his dominant position in the G.O.P. The stakes were extraordinarily high: Many of his Republican opponents see Mr. Trump as, at best, unelectable and, at worst, a threat to the foundations of American democracy.And yet, as the campaign has moved through the first nominating contests, the race has not revealed Mr. Trump’s weaknesses, but instead the enduring nature of his ironclad grip on the Republican Party. From the backrooms of Capitol Hill to the town hall meetings of New Hampshire to the courtrooms of New York City, Mr. Trump shows no sign of being shaken from his controlling position in the party — not in 2024, and not in the foreseeable future.“I think the party will be done with Trump when Trump is done with the party,” said David Kochel, a longtime Republican strategist who is opposed to Mr. Trump. “That’s the long and short of it.”All of Mr. Trump’s primary rivals, except Ms. Haley, have folded and endorsed his candidacy. He has conquered state parties and the Republican National Committee, installing loyalists in key posts, and collected the backing of vast numbers of Republican elected officials. And what once appeared to be extraordinary political liabilities — the 91 felony counts against him, his increasingly extreme rhetoric, his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol — have only served to bolster his support among the Republican faithful.With his victory on Saturday, Mr. Trump has swept all the early nominating contests — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, the U.S. Virgin Islands, South Carolina — an unprecedented achievement in a contested primary race. He heads into Super Tuesday on March 5, when a third of all delegates to the G.O.P. convention will be awarded, with “maximum velocity,” said the Republican governor of South Carolina, Henry McMaster, who endorsed Mr. Trump over his predecessor, Ms. Haley.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