Before Jan. 6, SC Republican lawmakers unified behind Trump. Now, they’re fractured
One year ago, in the days leading up to Jan. 6, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham told his colleagues the truth: If they wanted to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election, they would have to provide clear and convincing evidence.
They needed proof, Graham said, of the charges they were making. They needed to show that state and federal courts had failed, and that state legislatures had erred in certifying their electoral votes.
The South Carolina Republican put it plainly: “I will listen closely. But they have a high bar to clear.”
But as he stood on the Senate floor after an unimaginable day that sent his colleagues hiding from a mob of furious Donald Trump supporters who had attempted to overtake the U.S. Capitol, a symbol of democracy, Graham seemed ready to issue his verdict.
“I hate it to end this way. Oh my God, I hate it,” Graham said as he reflected on his journey with Trump. “From my point of view, he’s been a consequential president. But today (is the) first thing you’ll see. All I can say is count me out, enough is enough.”
Yet in the 12 months since his emphatic floor speech, Graham and the Republican Party’s loyalty to Trump has endured despite the events of Jan. 6.
Meanwhile, back in Washington, Democrats and Republicans continue to clash over the merits of a congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection as the panel prepares to release its findings.
And Republicans, especially, have struggled with how much to embrace the former president now that he’s out of office but remains a formidable force in the GOP. At least one South Carolina Republican appears willing to break away from Trump’s gravitational pull.
South Carolina’s eight GOP congressional members, some who spent months sowing doubt in the election process, now appear reluctant to revisit that day and the impact it continues to have in American politics and their own political futures.
Just two Republicans in South Carolina’s federal delegation agreed to speak to The State for this article about the riot and the efforts during the last year to investigate it. The remaining refused or did not respond to repeated requests for interviews.
“A lot of things that they know to be right or wrong are not electorally popular, and there’s no doubt that the Republican Party is going through a transformation of historic proportions,” said Jordan Ragusa, a College of Charleston political science professor whose research has focused on legislative behavior in Congress.
The GOP, Ragusa said, appears to be shifting away from its traditional Reagan-era brand of conservatism as a Trumpian version of the Republican Party comes into focus.
And South Carolina’s congressional members, who represent an early-voting state known for cementing Republican presidential politics, are unable to escape their party’s great existential debate.
“Most members, I suspect, are in the middle and they’re caught between these competing visions for where the party should go, and I think it’s easier in a lot of cases to keep your head down and not alienate either side,” Ragusa said. “But in doing so they are making a choice.”
Jan. 6 quiets fraud allegations from Trump allies
After the riot, Sens. Tim Scott and Graham, and freshman U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, R-Daniel Island, all voted to uphold the election results from Arizona and Pennsylvania — two battleground states that voted for President Joe Biden.
South Carolina’s remaining Republican congressional leaders — U.S. Reps. Jeff Duncan, Ralph Norman, Tom Rice, William Timmons and Joe Wilson — all voted to throw out those two states’ electoral votes.
One Republican, Duncan, said after the 2020 election that Trump was fighting “massive levels of Democratic fraud.” The Laurens Republican called for “every illegal vote to be thrown out” and a federal investigation.
A day after the storming of the Capitol, while condemning rioters, Duncan defended his choice to object to Arizona and Pennsylvania’s election results. But the riot, he said, required a full investigation.
In May, Rock Hill’s Norman pushed debunked theories about the rioters during a hearing.
“I don’t know who did a poll to say that they were Trump supporters,” he said, despite volumes of evidence from court hearings to photographs and videos.
On Jan. 11 — less than a week after the riot — Norman went to Facebook.
“And to those who say, ‘Well Ralph, there were obviously problems with this election but not enough to change the outcome,’ I simply ask: How many irregularities are acceptable?” Norman wrote. “How much fraud is tolerable? How many times is it okay for voting policies to be changed without the explicit approval of a state’s legislature?”
Wilson, R-Springdale, has said little in the months after.
“President-elect Joe Biden will take office next week and I look forward to working with him for the good of South Carolina and the United States,” Wilson said on Jan. 13.
Timmons, of Greenville, also has stayed mostly quiet.
In the days after the riot, he said rioters should be held accountable.
“We should avoid actions that further divide and inflame the passions of the moment,” Timmons said at the time.
Since those votes, though, these members who once served as megaphones for the former president’s messages between the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 riot have gone largely silent about that day, instead choosing to focus attacks on the Biden administration over other policies, such as the border and COVID-19 response.
All five repeatedly declined to speak to The State about the events of and after Jan. 6.
And when it came to whether an independent commission should investigate the capitol riot, as was done after the Sept. 11 attack, Rice was the only South Carolina Republican to vote for it. But he also joined his fellow South Carolina Republicans in voting against the creation of a select committee to investigate what happened on Jan. 6.
Rice said recently that he regrets voting against certifying Arizona and Pennsylvania’s electoral votes.
Like Graham, Scott also voted to certify the results of the 2020 election.
“There is no constitutionally viable means for the Congress to overturn an election wherein the states have certified and sent their Electors,” Scott said a day before the vote.
But on Jan. 6, Scott also introduced legislation to establish a bipartisan advisory committee to study the integrity and administration of the November 2020 general election that would, in part, tell state legislatures how to conduct federal elections.
The bill has gone nowhere.
The next month, Scott refused to connect Trump to the violent insurrection, instead, casting blame on the rioters rather than the man who told them, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
“The one person I don’t blame is President Trump,” Scott told Fox News ahead of the impeachment trial.
Scott, who generated 2024 buzz after giving a prime-time speech at the 2020 Republican National Convention, was later tapped to deliver his party’s response to Biden’s State of the Union address in 2021. Scott has now doubled down on his relationship with Trump.
When Scott kicked off his 2022 reelection campaign, he described the four years under Trump as “the good old days.”
His fundraising letters often include a glossy photo of him shaking hands with Trump in the Oval Office. And in November, Politico reported Scott was spotted interacting with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
Walter Whetsell, a longtime strategist for Republican candidates who also manages Rice’s campaigns, said debating the events of Jan. 6 gains nothing politically for Republicans. More plainly, it takes away from stronger issues Republicans can run on and debate, he said.
“When we’re talking about that (Jan. 6), we’re not talking about inflation, we’re not talking about gas prices, we’re not talking about grocery prices, we’re not talking about Afghanistan, we’re not talking about the border, we’re not talking about issues that we win on,” Whetsell said.
The ongoing Jan. 6 investigation
The claims — from election fraud to conspiracy theories — have, however, lived on.
A new NPR/Ipsos poll conducted one year since the events of Jan. 6 found one in three respondents believed the Jan. 6 attack was an attempted coup, while 28% say it was a riot that got out of control.
Yet, 17% of respondents cited baseless and debunked conspiracy theories when asked about what happened that day, falsely saying the events were carried out by “opponents of Donald Trump, including antifa and government agents.”
The constant questioning over the legitimacy of the 2020 results also has led to ongoing battles within factions of the Republican Party in South Carolina over how to address elections in the future.
In Lexington County — which voted for Trump by 30 percentage points — some party members called for a forensic audit of the county’s 2020 results, alleging Trump won by an even bigger margin. The state GOP rejected the request.
The Horry County GOP’s reorganization last year was all but defined by candidates’ fealty to Trump and his politics, and a slate of aggressively pro-Trump leaders took over in April. In the months since, leaders voted to censure state GOP Chairman Drew McKissick, who found himself being challenged by pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood for his position.
McKissick, with three endorsements from Trump, won reelection to the chairmanship with two-thirds of the vote.
And Greenville County’s GOP added a Trump-like hair swoop to its logo after the county party’s previous leaders abruptly resigned during the summer after facing unrelenting criticism from a group of far-right, pro-Trump activists.
Republican loyalty to Trump has House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-Columbia, worried, telling The State recently that the country’s democracy is teetering on collapse.
“If they want a cult-worshiping, then keep the Republicans in power,” Clyburn said. “Other than that, we’ve got to have a definitive election (this) year and get to the bottom of what happened on Jan. 6 and put safeguards in place so that it will never happen again.”
Clyburn said the Jan. 6 committee may need an additional 12 to 18 months to ultimately complete its work.
Former members of the Trump administration have refused to testify in front of the Jan. 6 commission, including Steve Bannon, who has been charged with contempt of congress, and former chief of staff Mark Meadows who initially provided documents to the commission, but has refused to testify.
Clyburn said members of Congress who helped rioters should be criminally charged but wouldn’t name members.
“Absolutely, everything that’s coming out now, there’s a lot of treason taking place. This stuff was treasonous. This wasn’t a one-off demonstration,” Clyburn said. “This was an insurrection planned. This is treason.”
GOP critics chart path forward
Prior to Jan. 6, Myrtle Beach Rep. Rice closely aligned with Trump.
The Capitol riot changed that.
“Where is the President!? He must ask people to disperse and restore calm now,” Rice tweeted the afternoon of Jan. 6.
In interviews and at town hall events since, Rice has said he was convinced the rioters would have injured or killed members of Congress, including then-Vice President Mike Pence. He said he was appalled that Trump didn’t immediately speak out.
Trump’s mid-riot tweet denigrating Pence was the final straw, Rice said.
A week later, Rice was among 10 Republicans who joined House Democrats to impeach Trump for a second time, a shocking move that incensed members of his own party. But, Rice said, while the vote was a break with Trump, it wasn’t a break with his beliefs or political convictions.
“I don’t think my politics have changed, I’ve always been one who wants to solve problems. I hate to say I’m loyal to any particular person. I’m loyal to our country, I’m loyal to our Constitution. I’m loyal to the ideals that are put forth by the Republican Party because I believe those ideals lift people up,” Rice said in an interview Wednesday, a day before the riot’s one-year anniversary.
“The GOP existed before Trump was the candidate, ... and the ideas that we promote haven’t changed before, during and since Donald Trump. And the ideals will exist long after Trump is an afterthought.”
Rice’s vote to impeach, though, was not without consequences.
He since been censured by the GOP at the state level and in his home district. And he now faces a crowded June primary, with some challengers raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in their attempt to oust him.
South Carolina’s other coastal representative, Mace, at first stood alone.
In one of her first votes as the newly elected congresswoman from South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, Mace voted to uphold the 2020 election results from Arizona and Pennsylvania.
She was the only House Republican from South Carolina to do so.
Mace had worked as coalitions director and field director for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign from September 2015 until August 2016. Her own political rise was uniquely tied to Trump. She was the first state lawmaker with direct ties to the campaign, and was proud of her resume.
But after the attack on Jan. 6, Mace told The State that she no longer believed in the man she helped elect.
When she was asked at the time about the impact Jan. 6 had not only on democracy, but on the Republican Party and its members, Mace’s voice began to shake.
“Everything (Trump) accomplished during the last four years of his presidency, that legacy has now been wiped out. It is gone, and we have to start over from scratch,” she said.
In televised media interviews, Mace called for unity and demanded that politicians in both parties turn down the rhetoric.
It didn’t last.
In February, Mace accused Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., of lying during an Instagram livestream where she discussed her own Jan. 6 experiences, and in November, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy reportedly scolded Mace and Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene for publicly feuding.
Mace voted against establishing an inquiry into the riot. Along with Rice, Mace was the only other Republican lawmaker who spoke to The State for this article.
“The events of Jan. 6 were troubling. I was there. I was accosted on the streets of DC the night before. I received death threats before, during and after,” Mace shared by text on Tuesday.
Mace said she stands by her vote against the creation of commission.
“I thought law enforcement was a better way to handle it than a political commission. I still believe that,” she said, noting there are four federal agencies and 10 congressional committees investigating Jan. 6.
“Now, a year later, no one in congress has sufficiently addressed the additional security measures that have been recommended nor has better training for our Capitol Police been implemented,” Mace said, adding she was proud of the bill she introduced to award a congressional gold medal to Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman, who held off rioters and redirected them away from lawmakers hiding nearby.
Back in her home district, Mace has drawn at least four potential Republican primary opponents, according to candidacy filings.
Trump is no longer rooting for her.
In November, the former president issued a statement urging “good and SMART America First Republican Patriots” to challenge a bevy of incumbent Republicans, including Mace and Rice.
Since then, Mace voted to hold Bannon in contempt of Congress for not appearing in front of the Jan. 6 committee. But she has also voted against holding Meadows in contempt after he, too, defied a subpoena.
Asked if she had any regrets about the comments she made after Jan. 6, Mace said by text that she was “going to stick with” the comments she already gave about her thoughts on the Jan. 6 commission.
For Sen. Graham, he initially looked into Trump’s election fraud allegations, going as far to call the Georgia secretary of state to ask about mail-in ballots and whether those from counties with higher unmatched signatures could be thrown out. Graham denied the assertions from the secretary of state.
He contributed $500,000 to Trump’s legal defense fund to contest the results of battleground states where Biden won. Graham would later tell journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, who co-wrote a book about the transition from Trump to Biden, that he privately thought the Trump arguments were suitable for the third grade.
Graham voted to certify Biden’s victory, and a day after the riot put some of the blame on Trump.
“The president needs to understand that his actions were the problem, not the solution, that the rally yesterday was unseemly, got out of hand. And a good friend of mine, Rudy Giuliani, did not help,” Graham said of Trump’s personal attorney who has continued to wage Trump’s war over unfounded allegations of voter fraud.
Months later, a political alliance that seemed to be on the brink collapse appears no longer in jeopardy.
“Donald Trump is the most consequential Republican in the entire Republican Party, maybe in the history of the party since Ronald Reagan,” Graham said during a Dec. 12 appearance on Fox News Sunday. “And if you’re going to lead this party in the House and the Senate, you have to have a working relationship with Donald Trump or it will not work.”
The pair continue to be golfing partners, as recently as this weekend at Trump’s homestead, where he urged Trump to cancel a Jan. 6 anniversary news conference.
“There could be peril in doing a news conference,” Graham said, Axios reported. “Best to focus on election reform instead.”
This story was originally published January 6, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Before Jan. 6, SC Republican lawmakers unified behind Trump. Now, they’re fractured."
