THE MAPS WEREN’T RACIST IN 2024. So Why Are SC Republicans Reopening Them Now?
- Javar Juarez
- 7 days ago
- 8 min read
By Javar Juarez | CUBNSC | Statehouse
Columbia, S.C. — Today, I sat inside a South Carolina House committee room and watched Republicans vote 12-2 to give the General Assembly authority to reopen congressional redistricting after the regular session ends next week. By afternoon, the full House passed S.883 on a party-line vote, with every Republican voting in favor.
To understand why that matters, you need to know one thing: congressional district maps determine whose voice reaches Washington. They determine whether your community elects a representative who looks like you, lives near you, and answers to you — or whether that power is diluted by design.
South Carolina has seven congressional districts. One of them — the 6th — is the only majority-Black district in the state and the only Democratic-held seat. It is represented by Congressman James E. Clyburn. It has been a target of conservative activists and MAGA-aligned figures for months.
What passed the House today and what is now moving toward the Senate is not merely a political maneuver. It is a jurisprudential earthquake — built on a foundation the legislature itself cracked when it stood before the Supreme Court of the United States and made an argument it is now quietly abandoning.
Because beneath the procedural language of S.883 lies a constitutional claim that collapses under the weight of the legislature's own prior words.
The Question That Went Unanswered
It was not asked by a legal scholar. It was not posed in a courtroom. It was asked inside a South Carolina House committee room by a Democrat who has sat through redistricting before and knows what it costs communities when lines move.
Representative Jackie "Coach" Hayes, D–Dillon County, pressed Representative Brandon Newton directly after the amendment was introduced:
"We passed a plan already that our Supreme Court has already approved, and we were all moving forward."
The implication underneath that statement was a question Newton never honestly answered:
If the Court already approved what we have — what exactly are we fixing?
Newton's response revealed everything. He said that if the maps were not constitutional or violated the recent ruling in principle, then the legislature should address that.
In principle. Not by court order. Not by constitutional mandate. Not because any judge has ruled South Carolina's current maps illegal. By political interpretation of a ruling that does not require South Carolina to act at all.
Hayes pressed further: "Will any maps be shown today?"
None were available.
The committee voted anyway.
What Republicans Told the Supreme Court
To understand why that question is so dangerous to the Republican position, you have to go back to Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, decided by the United States Supreme Court on May 23, 2024.
Following the 2020 Census, South Carolina Republicans redrew the state's congressional districts. Approximately 30,000 Black residents were moved out of Congressional District 1 — Nancy Mace's district — and absorbed into Jim Clyburn's heavily Democratic 6th Congressional District. The NAACP and affected voters challenged the map, arguing that race predominated in the drawing of those lines and that the legislature had engaged in an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
A three-judge federal district court agreed with the challengers. That court reviewed legislative records, expert testimony, precinct movement data, and racial voting patterns. It concluded that race had predominated. It found that Black voters had been moved with deliberate precision.
South Carolina Republicans appealed. And their central argument before the Supreme Court was this: these maps were drawn for partisan purposes, not racial ones.
The legislature contended the goal was to make Congressional District 1 safer for Republicans politically — and that because race and party affiliation correlate so heavily in South Carolina, what looked like racial targeting was actually partisan strategy.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for a 6-3 majority, accepted that argument. The Court reversed the lower court's finding, ruling that challengers had failed to sufficiently disentangle race from politics — to prove that the legislature moved Black voters because they were Black rather than because they were Democrats.
The maps stood. South Carolina Republicans won on the argument that their congressional districts were political instruments, not racial ones.
That was 2024.
What the Supreme Court Did on April 29, 2026
Eight days ago, the same Supreme Court — again through Justice Alito — issued its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais.
The case arose from Louisiana's attempt to create a second majority-Black congressional district under pressure from a lower federal court interpreting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
When Louisiana drew that district, a separate group of plaintiffs challenged it as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The Supreme Court agreed, holding that Louisiana lacked a compelling constitutional reason to use race in constructing the district because Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, properly interpreted, did not actually require it.
The ruling went further. The Court fundamentally narrowed the legal framework that civil rights groups have used for forty years to challenge maps that dilute Black voting power. It raised the evidentiary burden for Section 2 claims. It required plaintiffs to disentangle race from partisan politics — the same wall it built against challengers in Alexander — now applied against those seeking to protect majority-minority districts.
In practical terms: the primary legal tool Black communities have used to defend representation in federal court has been significantly weakened.
National Republicans recognized the opening immediately. Speaker Mike Johnson and Republican leaders across the South publicly encouraged state legislatures to revisit their congressional maps in the wake of Callais.
South Carolina Republicans heard that call. S.883 was the answer.
The Contradiction That Cannot Be Resolved
What Hayes exposed in that committee room is not merely a political inconsistency. It is a jurisprudential one — and it sits at the center of everything Republicans are attempting with S.883.
In Alexander, South Carolina Republicans argued — successfully — that their congressional maps were drawn for partisan reasons, not racial ones. The Supreme Court accepted that argument and extended to the legislature a presumption of good faith.
Now, in 2026, those same Republicans are invoking Callais — an anti-racial-gerrymandering ruling — as justification for revisiting those exact same maps.
But if the maps were constitutional partisan creations in 2024, as Republicans told the Supreme Court and the Court agreed, then what racial gerrymander suddenly requires correction in 2026?
The demographics of the 6th Congressional District have not changed. No new census has been conducted. No court has issued a fresh ruling finding South Carolina's current congressional maps unconstitutional. No emergency has emerged from the districts themselves.
What changed was the legal landscape — specifically, Callais weakened the tools available to protect majority-minority districts. And national Republican leadership identified that weakening as a political opportunity.
That is the contradiction at the center of S.883. Republicans cannot simultaneously maintain:
"These maps were political, not racial" — the argument that won in Alexander —
and
"We must revisit these maps because of a ruling about unconstitutional race-based districting" — the implication driving S.883.
Those two positions cannot coexist.
Either the districts were political all along, as Republicans argued before the Supreme Court, or race was central enough to their construction that Callais now renders them suspect. Republicans do not get to select whichever theory serves their political interest in a given moment.
Newton admitted no maps existed. No constitutional mandate compels action. The legislature is not responding to a crisis. It is manufacturing one.
What the Lower Court Knew That SCOTUS Reversed
There is one more layer that demands honesty.
The three-judge federal district court that originally reviewed South Carolina's congressional maps did not simply speculate that race predominated. It reviewed the record and concluded that Black voters had been moved with surgical precision. It believed the evidence supported a finding of racial targeting.
The Supreme Court did not say that the court was irrational. The Supreme Court said the challengers failed to meet the elevated evidentiary burden — specifically, that they did not sufficiently disentangle racial motivation from partisan motivation, and that they failed to produce an adequate alternative map to defeat the legislature's partisan defense.
That is a critical distinction. SCOTUS raised the bar for proving racial gerrymandering. It did not clear the legislature of the underlying conduct the lower court observed.
Now Callais narrows Section 2 protections further. The legal window to challenge maps that suppress Black political power is smaller than it has been in decades. And S.883 positions the legislature to act inside that narrowed window — with no maps produced, no public process announced, and no constitutional justification offered beyond the vague invocation of a Supreme Court ruling that does not require South Carolina to do anything at all.
What Is Actually at Stake
The 6th Congressional District is one of the last remaining Black-led Democratic strongholds in the Deep South. Congressman James E. Clyburn recently warned that America is drifting toward something resembling Jim Crow. That warning is not rhetorical excess. It is a precise reading of a legal trajectory.
Rucho v. Common Cause made partisan gerrymandering claims largely non-justiciable in federal court. Alexander made racial gerrymandering claims harder to prove. Callais narrowed Section 2 protections dramatically. Each ruling, written by the same justice, built upon the last.
S.883 is the legislative mechanism designed to exploit the cumulative result of that trilogy.
For Black South Carolinians, this is not a debate about district lines. It is a debate about whether the communities that built this state — that survived Reconstruction's collapse, Hamburg, the era of Ben Tillman and Wade Hampton, the systematic dismantling of Black political power through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries — retain the ability to elect representatives of their own choosing in the twenty-first.
The constitutional ground underneath S.883 is unstable because it rests on an argument Republicans themselves destroyed when they stood before the Supreme Court and insisted these maps were never about race.
Hayes asked the right question inside that room. South Carolina deserves an honest answer.
The Senate Is Next. Your Voice Is Required.
S.883 now moves to the South Carolina Senate. The House passed it unanimously among Republicans. The Senate has the power to stop it — or to expose the absence of any legitimate constitutional justification for what Republicans are attempting.
Contact your South Carolina state senator now. Demand they answer what Republicans in that committee room could not: What makes these maps unconstitutional now that weren't unconstitutional in 2024 when you defended them before the Supreme Court of the United States?
If they cannot answer that question, they should not vote to grant the General Assembly authority to redraw the lines that determine whether your community's voice is heard in Washington.
Find your South Carolina state senator at scstatehouse.gov.
The fight for representation in this state has never been handed to anyone. It has always had to be taken. This moment is no different.
Javar Juarez is an award winning investigative journalist and publisher at the Columbia Urban Broadcast Network (CUBNSC), an independent news outlet covering South Carolina politics, civic affairs, and community issues. He serves as President of Capital City A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI) in South Carolina, where he leads grassroots civic engagement and organizational advocacy. His reporting is rooted in Black American history and the political landscape of the American South.
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