'They're Cheating Four Years Early': Community Rallies at State House as Senate Convenes on Historic Sunday Session to Advance Controversial Redistricting Bill
- Javar Juarez
- 19 hours ago
- 8 min read
By Javar Juarez | CUBNSC | South Carolina Senate
COLUMBIA, S.C. — While the South Carolina Senate resumed debate on H.5683 — a mid-decade congressional redistricting bill drawn by the National Republican Redistricting Trust and promoted by dark money operation Fair Lines America under the leadership of Adam Kincaid — communities gathered on the State House grounds Saturday in an act of collective defiance.
The Ubuntu Collective, co-sponsored by the NAACP and Black Voters Matter, organized a day of education, alarm, and Black joy. By Saturday afternoon, the Senate had voted to return Sunday at 11:00 a.m. — what one member confirmed would be the first Sunday session in living memory — convened not for natural disaster, not for economic collapse, not for an act of terror — but for a congressional map.
That fact was not lost on anyone present.
"They're Cheating Four Years Early"
Zakiya Mickle, chief strategist and lead organizer of the Ubuntu Collective, did not mince words when CUBN caught up with her outside the State House.
"This is about power. This is about diluting the Black vote. This is about confusion and division and racism," Mickle said. "We keep making it about politics, but we can't keep making it about politics when they keep changing the rules of politics."
What Mickle described as cheating has a specific structural basis. H.5683 is being advanced in the middle of a decade — four years before the next decennial census would provide the population data that traditionally grounds congressional redistricting.
The maps, critics argue, are being drawn not on the basis of demographic reality but on the basis of partisan outcome. The person who drew the maps reportedly stated the explicit goal: seven Republican congressional districts in a state that currently sends six Republicans and one Democrat to Washington.
"The Senate is here on a Saturday trying to create seven Republican districts across the state. They said it. The person that drew the map said that," Mickle told CUBN. "And I want folks to know that that is cheating."
She continued: "People fought, bled, and died for the power of the Black vote. And I couldn't sit by quietly and let us just go on business as usual as they try to steal and dilute the Black vote."
A Legal Contradiction on the Record
Perhaps no voice on Saturday carried more institutional weight than that of Brenda Murphy, President of the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP — and a woman who was in the courtroom when this fight was last litigated before the United States Supreme Court.
The case was Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP. In that proceeding, Republican legislators and their allies argued under oath that the existing congressional maps — the very maps now being described by bill sponsors and the Lieutenant Governor as racially gerrymandered — were not racially gerrymandered.
They argued, successfully at the Supreme Court level, that the maps were partisan in nature, not racial. The Court, in a 2024 decision that drew widespread criticism from civil rights organizations, largely accepted that framing.
Now, those same legislators are before the Senate arguing that those same maps must be redrawn because they are racially gerrymandered.
Murphy addressed this contradiction directly.
"These same individuals that we've heard gloating about this particular topic — we've heard both Democrats and even Republicans vehemently express their concerns — but there are those that always refer back to Alexander v. SCNAACP, where they testified under oath to a judge that these maps were not racially gerrymandered," Murphy told CUBN.
When asked how she received the pivot — the same sponsors now claiming racial gerrymandering in the maps they once defended — Murphy was measured but firm. "That's a sensitive matter to me. And the reason why it is — I was in the courtroom. I had to testify."
Murphy also disclosed something that has received little attention in mainstream coverage: during the original map-drawing sessions, a senator present asked where a particular map had come from. The staffer running the session in the chair's absence reportedly said it came from Washington. "So this from Washington started some time ago, back with the initial maps," Murphy said. The maps before the Senate today, she made clear, represent not a correction of a discriminatory process — but an escalation of it.
"7-0. They want to take our voices away," she said. "But we're not gonna let them do that."
Pine Street Is Spartanburg's Mason-Dixon Line
James A. Jones, a United Citizens Party candidate for House District 31 and a sitting trustee on the Spartanburg School District 7 board, offered CUBN some of the most granular testimony of the day — because he lives the consequences of racially coded geography every time he attends a board meeting.
"Spartanburg itself has been split up. Right down Pine Street," Jones told CUBN. "The people inside of Pine Street are going to be potentially in District 5. The west side, the south side — where most Black Spartanburg is — will continue to be in District 4."
Jones connected the congressional lines directly to what he has witnessed in School District 7, where a five-member majority, all white, all residing on the east side of Pine Street, effectively controls a majority-minority district.
"There is already a line of demarcation that says to me: separate and unequal," he said. "It says injustice. It says that we have already a system that's screwed up — something that needs to be redistricted so that we have nine single-member districts instead of having a school system that is majority-minority but will always have a majority white board membership that doesn't live in the neighborhoods where the majority of the people live."
The congressional map, in Jones's assessment, doesn't create that division in Spartanburg — it ratifies one that already exists. And it does so at scale, with federal authority.
Jones also raised the specter of Clemson University and the University of South Carolina potentially sharing a congressional district — while Williams-Brice Stadium itself may fall outside the redrawn lines. Columbia, he noted, would be fragmented as well.
"We've seen this before," Jones said, referencing the 2000 Florida election and the broader arc of voter suppression across American history. His prescription was direct: organize beyond the anger. "People are mostly reacting instead of organizing now to make sure no matter what the district lines say, every individual who's eligible to vote is getting up, getting ready, getting themselves educated and prepared to protect our democracy."
Inside the Chamber: The Senator Who Asked If Anyone Can Explain This to a Child
While community members gathered outside, inside the chamber Senator Darrell Jackson delivered what may stand as the defining floor statement of this debate.
Jackson — also Pastor Jackson — drew a line that was historical, moral, and institutional all at once.
"Why is such a hyperpartisan situation — not a thousand-year flood, not a crashing economy, not a drought that our farmers in Darlington are staying up at night wondering how they're going to survive, not a massacre in Charleston in which innocent people lose their lives — why are we doing something that we haven't done in 33 years? And I asked the clerk to tell me when you can remember the last time anybody even recorded us coming in on a Sunday."
The answer the clerk could offer was a reapportionment session decades ago — one held, Jackson noted pointedly, by a Democratic supermajority whose names now appear on buildings across the State House campus. That body had more justification for urgency. This one, Jackson argued, does not.
"If I can't explain it to a child — if I can't go back and say they asked me, not Senator Jackson but Pastor Jackson, why are you going back to the State House today — if I can't explain it to them in a way that makes sense, I hope you guys can live with yourselves. I hope you can look at yourself in the mirror."
Jackson was equally surgical on the political logic driving the exercise. "The one time in over 40 years that the Senate has convened on a Sunday is for a partisan gerrymandering that could net possibly only one seat. Does anyone here think Congress is going to be won and lost by one seat? I have never seen a wave — red or blue — that was a one-seat margin."
His closing warning was pointed: this Sunday session, held on Memorial Day weekend, away from family, may ultimately produce nothing. The legal vulnerabilities in the maps — including precinct identifier errors in the bill text — combined with the Purcell principle, which courts apply to resist late changes to election administration once voting is already underway, may render whatever is enacted unenforceable before the November election.
The Legislative Landscape: Adjourned Past the Point of No Return
Senate leadership had voted to return Sunday at 11:00 a.m. to continue debate. The Senate voted 26-18 to invoke cloture on Saturday — but the chamber adjourned for the weekend without acting, and will not reconvene until after early voting has already begun Tuesday.
The central question is no longer whether enactment can happen before voters go to the polls. It cannot. The question now is whether Republicans will attempt to impose new congressional district lines on an election already in progress.
Seven Republicans voted no on cloture: Bennett, Campsen, Davis, Hembree, Massey, Rankin, and Zell. Rankin's position is the most layered — as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman, he led the committee hearing that advanced H.5683 to the full Senate floor before voting against cloture, suggesting his objection is procedural rather than substantive.
Massey's opposition runs deeper: he publicly argued that attempts to draw a 7-0 Republican map might actually produce a 5-2 split — giving reluctant colleagues intellectual cover to slow down. Bennett, Campsen, and Davis represent Lowcountry districts that would absorb pieces of a redrawn 6th, making their resistance as much about home-district stability as constitutional principle.
The Purcell principle now looms over everything. Courts are historically reluctant to impose new district lines once voting activity has begun, citing the risk of voter confusion and disenfranchisement. Whatever the Senate does when it returns, it will be doing it inside an election already underway.
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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