Redistricting debate shifts to South Carolina as Republicans seek clean sweep of House seats – US politics live

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An effort to reshape South Carolina’s congressional districts will get its first full airing Monday in the state House.

Lawmakers will launch a lengthy – and potentially testy discussion – over whether to accede to president Donald Trump’s calls for a US House map that could yield a clean sweep for Republicans, AP reports.

Debates already have played out in Tennessee, Alabama and Louisiana as Republicans push to leverage a recent Supreme Court ruling that weakened Voting Rights Act protections for minority districts.

The ruling has opened the way for Republicans to redraw districts with large black populations that have elected Democrats. In South Carolina, that means targeting a seat long held by representative Jim Clyburn, the only Democrat among the state’s seven representatives in the House.

Clyburn has said he has no intention of retiring, even if his district gets changed. He told reporters last week in Washington that he has addresses in Columbia, Charleston and Santee, adding:

double quotation markI live in three districts. I’ll decide which one to run in.

“It ain’t about Jim Clyburn’s district,” he added. “This isn’t about voting. This is about turning the clock back to Jim Crow 2.0.”

Early voting is scheduled to begin on 26 May for South Carolina’s statewide primaries on 9 June. In addition to redrawing congressional districts, legislation pending in the state House would move the House primaries to August. If it clears the House, the legislation then must go to the Senate.

In other developments:

• A US Senate official on Saturday removed security funding that could be used for Donald Trump’s planned $400m White House ballroom from a massive spending package, Democratic lawmakers said, imperilling Republican efforts to devote taxpayer money to the contentious project.
• The Republican senator Bill Cassidy lost his primary on Saturday, as voters in Louisiana opted instead to advance two challengers to a runoff election after an extraordinary intervention by Trump to oust the incumbent.
• With two days to go before the next big test of Trump’s iron grip over his party, the president went head-to-head on Sunday with his nemesis, Thomas Massie the Kentucky congressman who is in a fight for his political life in Tuesday’s Republican primary.
• Workers renovating one of Washington DC’s most historically symbolic sites in a project ordered by Trump may be risking their safety as they race to finish on time for the US’s , a union monitoring the site has warned.