Category Archives: SC News/Commentary

Courts won’t fix gerrymandering? We have a plan for that

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“We conclude that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts,” Roberts wrote. “Federal judges have no license to reallocate political power between the two major political parties, with no plausible grant of authority in the Constitution, and no legal standards to limit and direct their decisions.”

US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on court’s ruling on partisan gerrymandering, June 27, 2019

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Those of us working on redistricting in South Carolina expected today’s Supreme Court ruling that found no constitutional argument for ordering the states to end partisan gerrymandering. Nothing in the U.S. Constitution gives feds the power to tell states how to run elections. Its Framers were reasonably worried about that kind of centralized power. They remembered King George.

So what are advocates of reform to do? After all, it is unlikely that the majority party will relinquish its control of state government by giving up its control of redistricting. And with 70% of our legislators facing no opposition, the 2020 election will essentially yield the same results as in 2016. In other words, there is no incentive for incumbents to draw district lines that don’t benefit themselves and their party.

That means it’s up to us. Here’s how we do it.

The Fair Maps SC Campaign proposes a plan to create a citizens commission to draw district lines. The plan was built on our understanding that the court can’t — and the majority party of the state legislature won’t — fix our broken system. In most states, including South Carolina, state constitutions don’t allow for ballot initiatives to let citizens put an amendment on the statewide general election ballot. The six states that have successfully implemented redistricting reforms in the past decade did so through statewide citizen initiatives.

The Fair Maps SC Campaign introduced legislation in 2018 to create a Citizens Redistricting Commission (H-3432 & S-254) and a Joint Resolution for a Constitutional Amendment (H-3390 & S-249) to put the question on the November 2020 ballot.

Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter (at lecturn) and Sen. Mike Fanning (seated) are lead sponsors of legislation to create a citizens redistricting commission.

The unique part of the Fair Maps SC campaign is the 46–county plan to get voters to sign a petition to their county councils to direct their county legislative delegation to put the amendment on the ballot. State law empowers 15% of county voters to put a resolution before council that they shall adopt or put on the ballot for voters to consider.

Since the majority of our legislature is elected in the party primaries, and the total primary turnout in the last presidential year election was just 13.9% — 8.6% Republicans, 5.3% Democrats — it follows that a campaign to let citizens draw draw district lines would easily garner more votes than the legislators or county council members got when elected.

A statewide Survey on Redistricting commissioned by the SC Progressive Network Education Fund was conducted in 2016 by the University of South Carolina Institute for Public Service and Policy Research. It found that a majority (64.5%) of respondents prefer that legislative districts be drawn by an independent commission rather than the General Assembly. When given additional information about gerrymandering, they were more likely to believe that the drawing of legislative districts is not done fairly. (Survey Summary.)

The growing momentum for empowering citizens to draw fair maps does not mean that legislators will easily give up power, but when their constituents show that more of them voted for the county resolution than voted for them in the primary, it creates a new political dynamic that they will not be able to ignore.

This campaign must be bipartisan and led by Republicans and Democrats if we are to gather the required 500,000 signatures from voters by the end of September. State and federal laws consider ballot intitatives to be nonpartisan. This campaign may use grant money to promote the fair maps proposal in churches, schools, and to civic organizations.

We are enlisting the leadership of former elected officials from both parties who are ready to admit that partisan gerrymandering is not good for our democracy and will work to fix our broken system with a citizens campaign for fair maps.

Meanwhile, we are spending the time between now and when the legislature reconvenes in January to engage and mobilize individual activists and organizations in communities across South Carolina to fight for fair maps. It’s an idea whose time has come. Please join us.

Details and toolkit at FairMapsSC.com. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.

10,000 teachers make history at SC for Ed rally

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On May Day, 10,000 educators, students, and supporters marched from the state Education Department down Senate Street to the State House grounds, where they held a spirited rally — and made history. The grounds were a sea of red, a powerful show of unity and stregth, the crowd audible to lawmakers inside.

Sen. Mike Fanning opened the rally on the Network’s Healthy Democracy rolling stage,  and closed the rally at the State House with a call to action. A teacher himself, Fanning has championed educators in the Senate and is passionate about advocating for real reform rather than the lip service that’s been given for decades to education in South Carolina.

“For too long in South Carolina, teachers have been sitting back and letting non-teachers set the vision for learning, and that has to stop,” Fanning said.

“We have to speak up. We don’t want something done in 10 years — the time is now!

“You are here today — the largest gathering of teachers in the history of South Carolina — and you have done something my colleages never thought you’d do. We showed up by the thousands, we made noise, and we ain’t done yet.”

Teachers are asking for reduced class size and less mandated testing, and more mental health counseling. (Half of schools have no counselors, and half have them only on Tuesdays and Thursdays.)

Fanning said, “You’ve been bullied this week by the community, by your own state superintendent of education.” Molly Spearman issued a statement two days before the rally decrying the “walkout.”

“Year in and year out we rank 48th and 49th in teacher pay,” Fanning said. “We have a base per-student formula that we haven’t funded one time in 11 years. Eleven years doesn’t sound long to those folks, but that is an entire career of a student.

“This year the General Assembly had 1.1 billion extra dollars. Guess what we did to the base student formula? The House cut it by 18 dollars, the Senate cut it by three dollars. Whatever budget passes, you will get less money next year than you got this year per student.

“Eight people crafted the reform bill, with not a single teacher in the room. The bill passed the House 106 to 4. What’s the magic bullet, people ask: I say: Let teachers teach and students learn.

“You blew people’s minds today. Nobody exptected 10,000 teachers. If you’d shown up yesterday, it wouldn’t have been nearly as powerful as showing up with 9,999 others. I need you to make sure they hear your voice, and you’re not going away.

The rally ended with 10,000 voices chanting: I teach, I vote!

This could be a turning point in the long fight for public education in South Carolina. Whatever happens, the rally was a stunning example of worker solidarity that should inspire people across the state.

The SC Progressive Network offered logistical support at the rally. We look forward to collaborting with educators in the coming legislative session.

Sen. Mike Fanning chats with the Network’s Midlands coordinator Daniel Deweese

Family and colleagues of Rep. Joe Neal endorse House District 70 candidate Wendy Brawley

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“The SC Progressive Legislative Caucus has picked Wendy Brawley as the best candidate to shoulder the heavy burden left by the death of our dearest friend and colleague Joseph Neal,” Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter announced at a State House press conference Thursday.

Representatives Cobb-Hunter and Neal worked closely for the 23 years they served together in the State House before Neal’s untimely death last month. The two founded the nonpartisan Progressive Legislative Caucus in 2015 to focus on promoting state policies that improve the lives of working people and their families – not just in rural, black and poor District 70 – but across the state. “Joe was a true and rare servant of the public,” Cobb-Hunter said, “and the Progressive Legislative Caucus is pleased to lend our support to Wendy Brawley, a true fighter and seasoned leader to take up Joe’s work.”

Neal’s older brother and a longtime Columbia physician Dr. Green B. Neal said, “Of all the candidates, Ms. Brawley is the one I saw over the years working with Joe and our community, and doing good without any expectation of reward.”

SC Progressive Network Executive Director Brett Bursey said, “Joe was the heart of our organization. He helped establish the Network, and was our strongest champion inside and outside of the legislature. He cannot be replaced, but we expect Ms. Brawley to keep true to his mission.”

Brawley said she was humbled and honored by the support. “Joe Neal dedicated his life to helping those who were often overlooked and lived in the shadows. He will be sorely missed, but he leaves with us an incredible legacy of servant leadership. I look forward to the opportunity to continue Rep. Joe Neal’s work of caring, compassionate and effective leadership,” she said.

Wendy Brawley

Sen. Clementa Pinckney fought for publicly financed elections. It’s still a good idea.

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Sen. Clementa Pinckney addresses the media at a SC Progressive Network press conference at the State House in 2001. He was the lead sponsor of the clean elections bill, first filed in 2000, to reduce the influence of money in South Carolina elections. A study done for the Network in 2001 by the University of South Carolina found that a majority of citizens – Republicans, Democrats and Independents – support clean elections. It concluded that: “More than 60 percent of those surveyed believe that the cost of elections keeps many qualified people from running for public office, a majority believes that the state should have a system of public financing, and almost 60 percent would support a system of public financing if it would cost the average citizen about $3.50 a year.”

Network profiles three extraordinary SC women

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In 2014, the SC Progressive Network was awarded a grant from the Richland County Conservation Commission to produce a booklet about Modjeska Monteith Simkins. It was distributed free to readers in the Midlands, and was so well received that the Network ordered a second printing.

Last year, the Network received another grant from the Commission for two additional booklets, on gay rights activist Harriet Hancock and legal pioneer Sarah Leverette. The Hancock booklet came out in May; the Leverette booklet will be released in mid-August.

Becci Robbins, the Network’s communications director and author of the booklets, said of the project, “While I didn’t set out to write a trilogy, the booklets evolved into a package that now seems perfectly timed. Besides telling the stories of three phenomenal South Carolina women, they offer a chance to explore racism, sexism, and homophobia—problems continuing to fester in the nation’s addled psyche.

The booklet about Modjeska, whose grandparents were enslaved, reminds us of South Carolina’s grim past – and how it haunts us still. The booklet about Harriet went to press just days before the massacre in Orlando that left 49 people dead and 53 maimed in a gay nightclub.

And the last booklet about Sarah, who was born on the eve of women’s suffrage in America, comes out as the nation deliberates whether to vote for its first woman president. This historic election has come with the sad reminder in certain news outlets and on social media that misogyny is alive and well.

While the booklets provide no easy answers to the vexing problems we face, they give some historical context to help understand the current social and political climate in America and here at home. And they show the power a single citizen can have, given enough passion and commitment.
 
My hope is that these booklets will make their way into the hands of girls and young women who will be as moved and impressed as I have been by Modjeska, Harriet, and Sarah. It has been a great privilege to share their stories.”

Questions? Call the Network at 803-808-3384.

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Download this booklet to read about Modjeska’s extraordinary life.

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Click here to download Harriet Hancock booklet.

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The Sarah Leverett booklet is at the printer, and will be available in mid-August.

Federal courts find photo ID laws unconstitutional

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The argument the SC Progressive Network has been making about South Carolina’s photo ID law being a Republican plan to suppress the black vote has been taken up by new champions: federal judges across the country!

The 4th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals that struck down the North Carolina photo ID law on July 29 ruled “the demonstrated ingenuity of state and local governments in hobbling minority voting power… imposes cures for problems that didn’t exist.”

Most recently, the three-judge appeals court in Richmond ruled that North Carolina’s photo ID law was unconstitutional. It also voided new NC laws that cut early voting, ended same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting.

Although North Carolina’s “reasonable impediment” ballot for registered voters without a photo ID was modeled after the SC photo ID law, Executive Director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice Anita Earls advised that the ruling doesn’t automatically apply to South Carolina. Earls has 20 years of experience as a top attorney in the Voting Rights Section of the US Dept. of Justice. The SCEJ has been advising the Network on voting rights laws, and was a party to the North Carolina case.

Responding to the Network’s inquiry about the ruling’s impact on South Carolina, Earls said, “We think that there are some important distinctions among reasonable impediment schemes, and even though the North Carolina provisions were modeled on the South Carolina law, there is no immediate and automatic invalidation of South Carolina’s photo ID requirement as a result of this decision.”

Earls said that what won the fight in North Carolina was the difficulty in getting the free photo ID there. The operation was poorly run by the state DMV, rather than by each county board of elections, as in South Carolina. Opponents of the photo ID law in North Carolina were able to prove that people had a hard time getting the free ID and that many of the impediment ballots were not counted as required by law.

The task before opponents of the South Carolina photo ID law is to gather the data on the impact of the law on the 202,484 registered SC voters who the State Election Commission identified in 2012 as not having a DMV photo ID.

Network Director Brett Bursey recently requested the State Election Commission to provide a tally of how many of the provisional ballots cast in the 2014 election were for lack of photo ID, and how many of those impediment ballots were rejected. “I was told that the state Election Commission did not gather those numbers and I would have to go to each of the 46 counties for that information,” Bursey said. “Without that data, we can’t determine if our photo ID law had the same impact on black voters as it did in North Carolina.”

The Network will be seeking the information needed to determine the law’s impact.

Inaugural class graduates from the Network’s Modjeska Simkins School

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The students who graduated Aug. 24 from the Modjeska School’s summer session were a diverse mix: gay and straight, retired and collegiate, blue-collar, union and professional, black, Latino and white. The youngest was 2nd-grader Rose Duncan, daughter of guest lecturer Graham Duncan, and the eldest student was Eunice “Tootsie” Holland, who will turn 84 in December.

What they shared was an intense, three-month session that covered a South Carolina people’s history. The massacre at the Emanuel Church in Charleston took place just two days after we talked in class about Denmark Vesey’s 1822 slave rebellion. It was Vesey’s church that was again the chosen target of a violent racist attack. We added an extra class to talk about the tragedy, Sen. Clementa Pinckney – an ally of the SC Progressive Network – and the political maneuvering around the Confederate flag. Pressure from GOP candidates on the campaign trail forced Gov. Nikki Haley to call for the flag to come down. It was a stunning example to see how history is made, and remade.

The summer session covered South Carolina history as well as our own, teaching how the Network was created 19 years ago, and tracing its genealogy from the Grass Roots Organizing Workshop (GROW). Students also learned basic civics and organizing strategies. “You’re never too old to learn new things,” said Andy Sidden, pastor at Garden of Grace Church, “and, boy, did I!”

The school is a work in progress. “It was a privilege to have been a guinea pig for the noble experiment,” said Kyle Criminger. “We learned so much, so many stories that I had never heard. And it put the popular movement in historical context, and clarified our strategy and tactics.”

Course material will be revisited, repackaged, culled, expanded and posted to be accessible and user-friendly for students and the public. We are in the process of recording oral histories on key topics by South Carolina social justice movers and shakers, as well as uploading clips from the summer classes to share on the web site. Our goal is to see that the Modjeska School’s organizer training gets spread across the state by training up a corps of teachers and by also having on-line classes.

Students will carry what they’ve learned into the real world, starting immediately. They have signed up for at least one Network project, and will be working with other activists to expand and create Network initiatives. They are:

  • Medicaid expansion. South Caorlina is on track to privatize Medicaid funding, a really bad idea that’s driven by for-profit health care and anti-government ideologues. We will update our campaign for this new reality in 2016.
  • Racial profiling. Using the toolkit the Network created years ago, with a law we wrote to support it, we will teach community activists how to hold law enforcement accountable for its practices during traffic stops.
  • Missing Voter Project. The Network will continue its work on voting rights and targeting under-served communities to engage them and register them to vote.
  • Clean elections. Also called publicly financed, or voter-owned elections, this is the reform that can make all other reform possible. We will continue the work that Sen. Clementa Pinckney held dear, reducing the influence of money in politics.

Duncan said, “These last three months with the school have been incredible, and I feel fortunate and honored to have been included in helping develop a curriculum for the classes. Seeing a group of people come together to discuss how we can use lessons from South Carolina history to inform and influence our current efforts to organize in an attempt to enact more progressive policies gives me real hope for the future.”

Thank you to guest teachers Graham Duncan, Dr. Ed Madden, Dr. Hoyt Wheeler, Dr. Tom Terrill, Kevin Gray, Rep. Joseph Neal, and Meeghan Kane.

And congratulations to the graduates!

See more photos in our class album.

For more about the school, call 803-808-3384 or email network@scpronet.com.

Not all Medicaid expansion plans are created equal. Know the facts.

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1When the legislature returns in January, expect a new round of debate over Medicaid expansion. Do not be fooled by a plan that would take those federal funds and privatize them.

“They’re allowing states (Arkansas was the first) to take the billion-plus dollars and privatize it,” explains SC Progressive Network Director Brett Bursey.

“They put it into a cabinet agency – in South Carolina Nikki Haley appoints the head of the Health and Human Services – and they would then subsidize insurance for poor people by buying them an insurance policy with a private company like Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

It’s a really bad idea. It’s a bad idea financially. It’s a bad idea from a medical standpoint. It’s just actually obscene making that type of money off of our tax dollars by ripping off poor people, privatizing poverty.”

Don’t sanitize history; learn from it

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Since the Confederate flag has come down, there is some public sentiment that the state now must remove monuments erected to racist state leaders. The SC Progressive Network does not subscribe to that idea. Network Director Brett Bursey issued this statement:

“The tragedy in Charleston is a teachable moment, and a chance to talk honestly about the racist nature of our heritage. Removing monuments to white supremacists like Calhoun, Hampton, Simms or Tillman will not change the past, nor will it help future generations understand and change the institutionalized racism they inherit.

White supremacy is deeply woven into our history. It was, in fact, at the core of the state and nation’s founding. We support telling the truth about our former ‘heroes’ with additional plaques that explain their role in using race and class oppression to retain wealth and power.

If Ben Tillman is erased from our present history, we will not fully understand why and how our state ranks so consistently low on quality of life charts.”

The Network is in the process of creating a walking tour of the State House grounds, a people’s guide to its monuments. The project will launch this fall.

Brett Bursey began his life-long career as a progressive activist in 1968 as the SC State Traveler for the Southern Student Organizing Committee. He founded the Grass Roots Organizing Workshop (GROW) in 1975. GROW organized the SC Progressive Network in 1995.