Our View: A racket? Maybe — if you let them keep it

What do you call it when the party in power tries to throw out thousands of legally-cast ballots and cancel an election because it is going to lose?

Cheating? Obviously. Authoritarian? Yeah, probably, if you’re being blunt. But more than anything, it calls to mind a word our Republican friends dined out on during the Cold War.
Un-American.

Of course, now with the death of the S.C. GOP’s push to draw Democratic U.S. Rep. James Clyburn out of his 6th District seat after the primary election was already underway, the temptation to soften the edges of what just happened will be strong.

Yes, many will tell themselves, partisan politics is a tough business. Always has been, always will be. Besides, it was really just gerrymandering — and everybody does that, right?
Wrong.

Everybody doesn’t try to nullify absentee ballots, many from American soldiers serving overseas. And everybody certainly doesn’t vote for a bill that actually contains the words, “No votes cast in the June 9, 2026, statewide primaries for candidates for U.S. House may be counted.”

Yes, this may be hard to hear, particularly if you’re a longtime Republican voter who signed up for free markets and free people and is now being asked to defend cancelled elections and tossed-out votes. And yet that’s precisely what a majority of Republicans in our Republican-controlled House and Senate just voted to do.

No wonder Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey — one of five genuinely courageous Republican senators who originally joined with Democrats to help kill the bill — felt the need to invoke Benjamin Franklin’s famous “a republic, if you can keep it” warning as he denounced the effort on the floor.

But it was Massey’s own warning of a possible “corrupt bargain” that may come to define the whole episode.

To briefly recap: After S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster reversed his previous position and called a special redistricting session on May 14, rumors flew around the Statehouse that he’d made a secret deal with President Donald Trump to have the redistricting session, which Trump really wanted, in exchange for the president’s gubernatorial primary endorsement of McMaster’s hand-picked successor, Lt. Gov Pamela Evette.

And just when those rumors reached a fever pitch after Massey told reporters that he certainly “hope[d] there’s no corrupt bargain,” McMaster was forced to publicly deny a quid pro quo at a May 15 press conference.

All of which brings us, of course, to Trump’s “complete and total endorsement” of Evette on May 29 — an endorsement accompanied by the news that he expects her to pick political neophyte Henry McMaster Jr. as her running mate this fall.

Huh?

Even assuming that’s all a series of eye-catching coincidences involving public reversals, schemes to cancel elections and hints of primogeniture, it’s hard not to think of the words of famed Southern political scientist Lynyrd Skynyrd — “ooh, that smell.”

Or perhaps a little more seriously, consider the words of social critic Eric Hoffer: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

Because you don’t have to believe in explicit quid pro quos to recognize decadent behavior from a party grown too accustomed to unchallenged power when you see it.

Or as Ben Franklin might put it, with this November’s elections right around the corner: Maybe it’s a racket — if they can keep it.