MAP WAR IN PLAIN SIGHT

THE ATTEMPT TO ERASE CLYBURN’S DISTRICT IS THE MAP WAR IN PLAIN SIGHT.

South Carolina is now one of the clearest tests of whether America still believes Black voters are allowed to matter.

After Louisiana v. Callais, Republican-controlled states across the South began moving to redraw congressional maps mid-decade. In South Carolina, the target is obvious: Rep. James Clyburn’s 6th Congressional District, the state’s only Democratic-held U.S. House seat and its central Black-opportunity district. Democracy Docket reports that Gov. Henry McMaster is expected to call lawmakers back for a special session to redraw the state’s congressional map after the Senate appeared to derail the effort. 

This is not ordinary map maintenance. This is power trying to finish a job.

Bloomberg Government reports that South Carolina senators rejected President Trump’s call to redraw the state’s districts and threaten Clyburn's seat. For now, that means the 2026 election may proceed under the same lines used in 2022 and 2024, when Republicans held six of seven seats and Clyburn was reelected in a Black-plurality 6th District. But the pressure has not vanished. It has simply moved to the next door: the governor's office, a possible special session, and a simple-majority path. 

The civic danger is bigger than Clyburn. It is about whether Southern Black representation can survive a Court that now treats race-conscious voting-rights remedies as constitutional suspect while allowing extreme partisan gerrymanders to hide racial effects. The Supreme Court’s Callais decision involved a Louisiana map drawn after earlier litigation over whether Louisiana needed another majority-Black district; when Louisiana drew one, challengers attacked it as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the Fourteenth Amendment. 

Justice Kagan's dissent named the trap: under the majority's test, plaintiffs may need to prove discriminatory purpose even where maps dilute minority voting power, a burden she called nearly impossible and part of the Court's "now-completed demolition" of the Voting Rights Act. 

That doctrine is now being translated into political action. South Carolina Public Radio reports the Senate rejected the redistricting push 29–17, with five Republicans joining Democrats, after concerns about timing, courts, election administration, and the fact that absentee ballots had already been sent. It also reports that early voting opens May 26 and the statewide primaries are June 9. 

Think about that. Ballots are already moving. Voters are already entering the election season. Yet power still wants to reopen the map.

Critical race theory gives us the language for what polite politics tries to hide. The issue is not only race as identity; it is race as structure. Black voters in South Carolina have been packed, cracked, and managed through generations of legal architecture. Now the same system can say it is "just partisanship" when Black political power is weakened, because Black voters are treated as politically inconvenient rather than racially targeted.

Michael Dorf writes that Republican-controlled legislatures are racing to redraw maps to eliminate districts where Black and other minority voters had been able to elect representatives, and that this is legally easier when lawmakers claim partisan rather than racial motives. 

That is the modern trick: use race to build the imbalance, use party to defend it, use courts to bless it, then call the result democracy.

Clyburn's seat is not merely one seat. It is a symbol of whether the South's Black Belt will retain a voice in Congress or be treated as a problem to be engineered away. The San Diego Voice & Viewpoint frames this as part of a long campaign against the Voting Rights Act, tracing a line from Shelby County to Brnovich to Alexander to Callais. 

The answer must be peaceful, disciplined, public, and relentless: defend fair maps, expose racialized power grabs, support voting-rights litigation, demand congressional action, and organize voters before the mapmakers finish their work in the dark.

Because when they come for Clyburn’s district, they are not only coming for one congressman. They are coming for the idea that Black voters in the South deserve power equal to their citizenship.