Republicans in South Carolina defy Trump to reject voting map changes

Republicans in South Carolina have defied US President Donald Trump ahead of the November midterm elections by blocking a measure to redraw voting maps in their favour.

They allowed the state's only Democrat in the US House of Representatives, Jim Clyburn, to keep his seat intact, foiling Republican chances of gaining another seat in the House.

They cited the fact that some South Carolinians were already heading out to the polls.

With the midterms less than six months away, the two parties are locked in a fight to gain control of the House by having states redraw their voting maps, in a process known as redistricting.

"Neither my conscience nor my common sense would allow me to stop an election that is already underway," South Carolina Republican state Sen Richard Cash said during the vote.

It was a second victory for Democrats, with an Alabama court also temporarily blocking voting maps that it ruled were "intentionally discriminatory".

The Democrat wins come after last month's Supreme Court decision, which reversed a decades-old precedent and ruled that the Voting Rights Act, passed during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, did not require states to create congressional districts that provided minority voters with the opportunity to elect candidates roughly in proportion to their overall population in the state.

Only overt racism, the court's conservative majority held, was grounds for nullifying a state's congressional map. "Gerrymandering" districts to provide partisan advantage – as the process is called – is constitutional, even if it dilutes minority voting power.

That prompted a series of Republican-dominated southern states to scramble to dismantle their court-mandated majority minority districts – which, because of historic political preferences, were mostly held by black Democrats – and replace them with ones that Republicans were likely to win.

It is all part of preparation for the midterms, with each party vying to foil or further Trump's agenda during the latter half of his term.

On Tuesday, The federal district court in Alabama temporarily blocked a congressional map adopted by its GOP-led legislature in 2023 for the November midterm elections.

The court's panel of three judges said that plan, which includes one majority-black district, is racially discriminatory and violated the US Constitution's 14th Amendment.

The judges instead ordered the state to continue using the court's "race-blind map" that includes two majority-black districts, which were used in the 2024 elections after the 2020 census.

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrat in the lower chamber of Congress, accused Republicans and Trump of engaging in a "desperate power grab" by redrawing maps to tighten their grip on the House majority in the November midterms.

"There will be a free and fair election in November," he said in a statement to CBS News, the BBC's US partner.

The NAACP, the US's oldest civil rights organisation, also applauded the Alabama federal court ruling on Tuesday, saying that it preserved black representation.

"Redrawing maps to silence the voices of entire communities cannot be tolerated. It goes against the very values of democracy that our ancestors fought and died for," said NAACP President Derrick Johnson, adding that despite the "good news", it "is not the end of this fight".

Last month, the conservative justices on the US Supreme Court sided with a challenge to new districts in the state of Louisiana that were created to comply with a landmark Civil Rights law meant to protect black Americans from racial discrimination.

The 6-3 ruling makes it more difficult to successfully challenge legislative maps for diluting the voting power of racial minorities.

Other Republican states, including Florida, Tennessee and Mississippi, are either in the process of considering or redrawing their maps in the upcoming weeks.

The arms race kicked off last summer when Trump called on Texas to redraw its maps to gain more Republican seats in the House.