Shane Massey, the Republican leader of the South Carolina Senate, described his party’s attempt to redraw the state’s congressional map as a “perfect example of just how much elected officials have lost their way.”
In an impassioned, roughly 45-minute speech that spoke to national frustrations over anti-democratic gerrymanders, Mr. Massey listed the reasons he would vote not to return to the Capitol to take up redistricting.
“Too many people in power just want to do whatever it takes to stay in power,” he said. “They’ll do whatever it takes to keep it, but I ask to what end? What do you do with it when you’ve attained it?”
His speech came after facing days of calls, texts and online posts pressuring him to eliminate South Carolina’s sole Democratic-held congressional district. Mr. Massey said even President Trump had called him last week — his first conversation with the president — to discuss how South Carolina could help him sweep the state’s congressional delegation.
“Look, I hope you can help us out,” Mr. Massey recalled the president telling him.
In Mr. Massey’s view, however, it wasn’t that easy.
While opponents of the ruthless national redistricting battle have often been on the losing end, isolated intraparty conflicts have impeded a wholly partisan reshaping of congressional districts. Republicans in Indiana broke with Mr. Trump last year, and Bill Ferguson, the Democratic leader of the Maryland Senate, effectively blocked a redistricting drive in his state.
But few have spoken as explicitly, or extensively, as Mr. Massey. On Tuesday, he was one of five South Carolina Republicans who voted not to approve an agreement that would have allowed the Legislature to reconvene this month for redistricting. Now, the state appears unlikely to join the redistricting frenzy that has taken hold across the country, especially in the South, since the Supreme Court last month weakened the Voting Rights Act.
Reading from prepared remarks, Mr. Massey ticked off what he saw as the clear ills of the redistricting battle: new maps splitting communities with common interests, confusing voters, throwing primaries into chaos, endangering the right of overseas voters and military members to vote in those primaries and eroding trust in government institutions.
Mr. Massey was clear that he had no qualms with drawing lines to favor his party, and had done so in 2021. But, he said, the existing map was the best Republicans were going to get.
He said that in fact changing the maps further was “extremely risky” and could result in Democrats picking up a seat. “Very candidly, you’re going to motivate Black turnout, and there will be repercussions from that,” including on local races, he said.
Mr. Massey echoed concerns that have been also voiced by Senator Lindsey Graham, the senior Republican from South Carolina, and Gov. Henry McMaster, a term-limited Republican, who has said that he would let the Republican-controlled General Assembly decide the matter.
He acknowledged that defying the president carried risks, a nod to the Indiana Republican legislators who refused to redistrict and then lost primaries this month to Trump-backed candidates.
“That’s a possibility, if not a likelihood, and I’m comfortable with that, because my conscience is clear,” Mr. Massey said.
He also bristled at the outside influence. “I cannot in good conscience surrender this authority that has been preserved to, for and by the states and merely take orders from those who are not in South Carolina.”
He closed with a meditation on the remarks of Benjamin Franklin after the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia, when Mr. Franklin said that what emerged from their efforts was “a republic, if you can keep it.”
Mr. Massey said an endless redistricting race threatens that republic, and issued a warning.
“Maybe we become convinced that the only way to preserve the republic is to implement policies that are contrary to the founding ideas of the republic,” he said. “Maybe we turn on ourselves, maybe 250 years in, maybe we can’t keep it. I really hope that’s not the case, but maybe it is.”
“But if that’s to happen, if we’re going to further erode those institutions, if we’re going to further erode those essential governmental protections, if we’re going to lose this radical idea of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, a nation that in its Constitution, guarantees to each state a republican form of government to ensure the debate of ideas,” Mr. Massey said.
If that’s going to happen, he said, “by God, it’s not going to be because I surrendered it. I’m voting no.”
Eduardo Medina is a Times reporter covering the South. An Alabama native, he is now based in Durham, N.C.
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