By Bill Davis | State Sen. Joel Lourie (D-Columbia), a 17-year veteran of the legislature who won’t face voters next year, wants to change how South Carolinians elect their representatives and senators.
Two weeks ago, Lourie, the son of the late former state Senate Majority Leader Isadore Lourie, announced he would not run again for his seat in 2016. The younger Lourie served in the state House from 1998 to 2004, and in the Senate since 2004.
Lourie, who made headlines in the last two years calling for substantial reform of the state Department of Social Services, currently is championing the call for the legislature to address how state political districts are redrawn every 10 years, an inside-baseball mapping process called reapportionment that is the lifeblood of who survives and who doesn’t politically. For too long, Lourie says, state political districts have been created to not only protect incumbent Republican interests, but have also shifted when politicians are elected.
Lourie argues that the “actual” statewide elections are held in June, during primaries, and not during November, as is intended.
He contends that the reapportionment of districts, tied to U.S. Census population reports released every decade, has become so stacked in favor of one party or the other that the actual election is a mere formality.
And this limits democracy in South Carolina and across the country, Lourie maintains
That’s not to say Republicans are solely guilty of gerrymandering districts, as history has shown that Democrats did it in South Carolina years ago when Lourie’s father served in the legislature.
And Lourie knows that he and other Democrats who espouse putting together bipartisan and impartial blue-ribbon panels to take over reapportionment when the Census comes back around in 2021, could come off as sour-grapers who can’t wrest control of the process from the GOP.
One of the GOP leaders in the Senate, Judiciary Chairman Larry Martin (R-Pickens) says the issue is more complicated than just party politics. Other states, like Texas, have fallen afoul of state and federal courts in their attempts to redraw lines for racial and political balance.
Making all state political districts more resemble South Carolina’s racial demographics would cause two problems, according to Martin.
One, because of very low minority population numbers in the Upstate around Greenville and Spartanburg, the legislature would be forced into creating super-long mega districts that would include distant black communities in the Midlands and possibly even the Lowcountry in districts that originated in the Upstate.
Two, Martin says creating geographically wandering districts that include 40-42 percent minority voter bases could backfire, further limiting black and minority representation on a state level. The thinking is that the 58-percent white majority could be more likely to cast votes on racial lines.
That, says Martin, a veteran of three reapportionments, could drastically reduce the number of black legislators.
Turning to blue-ribbon panels, even in only advisory roles, would likely fall afoul of the state Supreme Court, Martin says, which has ruled against the maneuver in a statewide education funding matter in the past.
House Democratic leader and back-room maven Gilda Cobb-Hunter of Orangeburg says that saying that precedent is stacked against commissions, like the one that led the state in its federal military base realignment process, reveals the lack of political will on the right to do what’s best for South Carolina.
“Don’t we learn? Just because it’s South Carolina, does that mean we can’t try to do something better?” asks Cobb-Hunter, who has signed onto a House reapportionment bill that languished in committee all session this year.
USC political scientist Todd Shaw, an expert on black political issues, says there is no “silver bullet” for striking a balance between politics and democracy.
Shaw says a more subtle solution may lie in the state looking at the “aggregate” racial representation in the legislature as a whole, versus focusing on political parties. If the state is 40 percent black, then whatever solution evolves in the next five years could make sure that the legislature is equally diverse.
Currently, of the 170 legislative seats in the House and Senate, there are only 38 members of the S.C. Legislative Black Caucus. It used to be 39, but the passing of state Sen. Clementa Pinckney (R-Jasper County) earlier this year in an infamous church shooting in Charleston reduced the number by one.
Forty percent would be closer to 70 black-held seats.
Lourie says a bigger goal would be to make South Carolina politics less “bitterly partisan.” Pushes from fringe groups from both sides during the primaries, he says, force politicians to take positions they personally do not believe in to protect their political futures.
Lourie says without real, competitive general November elections on the state political calendar, “honest and intellectual” discussion of tough issues, such as Medicaid expansion, can never happen.
We Can Do Better, South Carolina!