South Carolina Republicans are stealing Jim Clyburn’s congressional seat by erasing the Black voters who have elected him for 34 years. The mechanism is a new congressional map the Republican supermajority is drawing this weekend to eliminate the state’s only majority-Black district. Jim Clyburn has represented South Carolina’s 6th District since 1992. The voters who elected him 17 times will cast ballots in November in a district that has been redrawn to ensure their votes do not count. Chad Caton, a Republican activist testifying at the redistricting hearing, said the quiet part out loud: “Here in South Carolina, we have a supermajority as Republicans. And sometimes, when you win the game, you get to spike the football.” That is not politics. That is theft.
Maya Shells testified at the same hearing. Shells has lived in Clyburn’s district her entire life. She told South Carolina’s senators that “district lines aren’t just borders on a map, but they really represent our voice and our ability to advocate for the needs of our community.” The voice Shells is talking about is the voice South Carolina Republicans are erasing. Not by convincing the voters in the 6th District to vote for someone else. By redrawing the district so the voters’ choice does not matter. The theft is not subtle. The theft is documented in real time in the public hearing at which Caton and Shells both testified. Caton said the Republicans have the power and they are using it to spike the football. Shells said the district lines represent her community’s voice. One of them is about to be proven right.
The institutional authors
The maps do not draw themselves. South Carolina’s Republican legislators are drawing them. The state legislature has a Republican supermajority. Someone introduced the bill. Someone chairs the committee marking up the maps. Someone will bring the maps to the floor for a vote. Someone will vote yes. All of them have names. The public reporting does not name the specific legislators who introduced the bill or who chair the relevant committees, but the operation is not anonymous. The Republican supermajority Caton cited in his testimony is not a weather condition. It is the product of elections South Carolina Republicans won, and the power Caton says Republicans are exercising is the power those legislators hold and are using to redraw the maps.
The Supreme Court justices who built the legal architecture that permits this theft have names. John Roberts wrote Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, gutting Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh joined that majority and have written subsequent opinions weakening Section 2. The Voting Rights Act once required states with histories of racial discrimination in voting to get federal preclearance before changing election maps. Roberts’s Shelby County decision eliminated that requirement. South Carolina is using the permission Roberts granted. The voters whose districts are being redrawn to dilute their power are paying for Roberts’s decision.
Clyburn told NPR he does not care where the lines are drawn. “I’m going to run. I’m going to run on my record and America’s promise.” The College of Charleston political science professor Claire Wofford told NPR she does not expect Democrats to hold the seat under the redrawn maps. “On paper, I really don’t see the Democrats holding onto that seat.” Wofford is reading the maps South Carolina Republicans are drawing. The maps are being drawn to ensure Wofford’s reading is correct. The question is not whether Clyburn runs. The question is whether the maps are drawn to ensure his constituents’ votes count for less than they counted before. The answer is yes. That is the operation. That is what theft is.
Who benefits, who pays
South Carolina’s Republican Party benefits. The Republican congressional candidates who will run in the redrawn districts benefit. The Republican House majority Trump depends on to hold power benefits. The donors, consultants, and party infrastructure whose income depends on Republican control benefit. The Federalist Society lawyers who built the Supreme Court majority that gutted the Voting Rights Act benefit. John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh wrote the opinions that permit South Carolina to do this. The justices built the legal architecture. South Carolina Republicans are using it. The Black voters in the 6th District are paying for it.
Who pays? The Black voters in South Carolina’s 6th District whose voting power is being diluted. Maya Shells, who testified that district lines represent her community’s voice, pays. Every Black voter in the 6th District who has cast a ballot for Jim Clyburn over 34 years pays. The voters did not lose an election. The voters are having the district redrawn around them to nullify the election results they would otherwise produce. Clyburn himself pays. Clyburn is 85 years old. He has served in Congress for more than 30 years. He was, before Barack Obama, the highest-ranking African American in legislative or executive branch in United States history. He delivered South Carolina’s Democratic primary to Joe Biden in 2020, which delivered Biden the nomination, which delivered Biden the presidency. Clyburn’s political capital is real. His relationships are real. The flow of federal dollars to South Carolina he has secured over three decades is real. South Carolina Republicans are terminating his career not by defeating him in an election but by redrawing the district to make his election impossible.
The Democratic Party pays. The Congressional Black Caucus pays. Every voter in South Carolina who will lose the institutional weight Clyburn carries pays. The cost is not speculative. Wofford told NPR that Clyburn’s significance in South Carolina is hard to overstate. The cost of losing that significance is paid by the people who depend on the federal resources Clyburn delivers and the people who depend on Clyburn’s voice in Congress.
The spike and the football
Chad Caton’s testimony is a confession. “When you win the game, you get to spike the football.” The game Caton is talking about is not an election. The game is the acquisition of a supermajority in the state legislature, which gives the majority the power to redraw congressional maps without the minority’s consent. The football being spiked is Jim Clyburn’s seat. The spike is the redrawing of the 6th District to eliminate majority-Black representation in South Carolina’s congressional delegation. Caton is not pretending there is a neutral redistricting principle at work. He is not pretending the maps are being drawn to produce compact districts or to respect communities of interest or to comply with any of the criteria redistricting reformers cite when they argue for fair maps. He is saying: we have the power, we are using the power, and the power we are using is the power to take your seat.
The argument Caton is making is the argument every powerful actor makes when the powerful actor no longer feels the need to justify what he is doing. Power justifies itself. We won, you lost, we take what we want. The argument is not new. The argument is the argument the Southern governors made in the 1890s when they rewrote their state constitutions to eliminate Black voting after Reconstruction ended. The argument is the argument every authoritarian makes at the moment the authoritarian stops pretending democratic norms constrain him. Caton’s argument is not politics. It is the abandonment of politics in favor of raw power.
Maya Shells’s testimony is the rebuttal. “District lines aren’t just borders on a map, but they really represent our voice and our ability to advocate for the needs of our community.” Shells is saying: the maps are not neutral. The maps are not technical. The maps are political power made visible. The district lines determine whether her community has a voice in Congress or does not have a voice. Shells has lived in Clyburn’s district her entire life. The voice she is talking about is the voice her community has had for 34 years through the representative they elected 17 times. South Carolina Republicans are taking that voice. Not by persuading the voters in the 6th District that they should elect someone else. By redrawing the district to make the voters’ choice irrelevant.
The tension between Caton’s testimony and Shells’s testimony is the tension between power and democracy. Caton is arguing that power, once acquired, justifies its own use. Shells is arguing that democracy means her community’s voice counts. One of those arguments is correct. The other is theft. South Carolina Republicans are proceeding with the theft.
Robert Smalls and the longer arc
Jim Clyburn told NPR that his hero in politics is Robert Smalls. Smalls was among the first eight Black South Carolinians elected to Congress during Reconstruction. Smalls’s political career ended when Southern white supremacists rewrote South Carolina’s constitution in the 1890s to eliminate Black voting. Clyburn told NPR: “I’ll be in pretty good company if that were to happen.” Clyburn is acknowledging that the theft he is watching this weekend is the same theft Robert Smalls faced in the 1890s. The mechanism is redistricting rather than constitutional rewriting, but the purpose is identical: eliminate Black voting power, eliminate Black representation, and restore white control.
The parallel Clyburn is drawing is exact. Reconstruction produced Black political power in the South. Southern white supremacists used legal mechanisms to eliminate that power. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 restored federal protection for Black voting. The Supreme Court’s Shelby County decision in 2013 eliminated that protection. South Carolina Republicans are using the permission Shelby County granted to do in 2026 what South Carolina white supremacists did in the 1890s. The theft is the same theft. The legal architecture is different. The result is identical.
Martin Luther King Jr. told the nation in 1963 that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” The justice King was demanding was the justice the Reconstruction Congress had promised and the Southern states had stolen. The Voting Rights Act was the federal government’s acknowledgment that King was right. The Shelby County decision was the Supreme Court’s announcement that the federal government would no longer enforce that promise. South Carolina’s redistricting this weekend is the theft King warned against, permitted by the Court Roberts leads, executed by the legislature Caton represents.
The arc of the moral universe is long, King said, but it bends toward justice. The arc bends only when specific people in specific moments push it. The Black voters in South Carolina’s 6th District are not waiting passively. Maya Shells testified. Clyburn is running regardless of where the lines are drawn. The Congressional Black Caucus is watching. The litigation that follows this weekend’s redistricting vote will be filed by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the ACLU, whose attorneys have the receipts and will force South Carolina to defend the theft in federal court. The arc bends when the theft is made too expensive to sustain.
What you do
You name what is happening. South Carolina Republicans are stealing Jim Clyburn’s congressional seat by erasing the Black voters who have elected him for 34 years. The mechanism is the new maps the Republican supermajority is drawing this weekend. The beneficiaries are the Republican Party and the candidates who will win under the redrawn maps. The cost-bearers are the Black voters whose power is being diluted and Jim Clyburn whose 34-year career representing his community is being terminated. The institutional authors are the South Carolina Republican legislators who will vote yes and the Supreme Court justices who built the legal architecture that permits the theft.
You call the South Carolina State House at 803-212-6200 and you call the State Senate at 803-212-6200. You tell them the theft is theft and you will remember their votes. You fund the NAACP Legal Defense Fund at naacpldf.org and the ACLU at aclu.org whose court filings will force South Carolina to defend the maps. You register voters in the redrawn districts through organizations like the South Carolina Democratic Party and Fair Fight Action. You organize turnout in November in numbers large enough to win the redrawn districts anyway. You refuse to let the theft be normalized as redistricting. The theft is theft. The perpetrators are named. The cost-bearers are documented.
Maya Shells told South Carolina’s senators that district lines represent her voice. Chad Caton told the same senators that Republicans have the power and they are spiking the football. One of them is about to lose. The arc bends when you push.