SC Congressional Reps Not Taking the Long View

They're mad about empty chair town halls instead of being sidelined as a branch of government

In her post yesterday, historian Heather Cox Richardson explains how the Trump administration is being controlled by two main ideological forces: the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 and the techno bros, inspired by the pedantic writing of Curtis Yarvin, computer scientist turned unfortunate blogger (his platform, lamentably, hosted on Substack). Yarvin believes American democracy is over, and we have to replace the entire federal government with a CEO corporate structure, a neo-monarchy. Yarvin’s ideas have been adopted by other far-right tech billionaires like Peter Thiel, and are clearly the driving force behind DOGE and Musk’s hostile takeovers.

March 27, 2025

By now I guess I’ve made my peace that we’ve elected a mob boss who is being directed by other criminals intent on destroying the country and setting up some kind of dystopic America Corp to run the oppressions and extract labor and resources. But I can’t fathom how the Republicans in Congress think supporting all this makes sense for them. Understandably, Americans around the country, even in districts that supported Trump by large margins, are horrified at the blatant class warfare and attacks on our people by our own federal government, and are calling for their congressional representatives to fight back.

While some of these representatives have done some townhalls (to much booing and protest, you love to see it), in South Carolina all of ours (except Representative Clyburn, bless him) have avoided convening or attending any meaningful meetings with their constituents. To highlight their abdication of duty, we’ve organized empty chair townhalls and taken out billboard ads to expose their cowardice and poor job performance.

While William Timmons and Tim Scott don’t seem to have much to say, our favorite local gal Nancy Mace thinks a good strategy to set up her run for governor is to say things like this on Facebook:

I hope this woman has a fainting couch in her office. What a damsel!

Lindsay Graham is so eager to get reelected and see Trump dissolve Congress that he said this, what a dutiful sycophant:

“I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing to help President Trump.”

I’ll be very curious to see how their full-throated support for the fascist dismantling of democracy will benefit our state (that they represent, do they remember?), a state that ranks FIFTH in terms of dependence on federal dollars. A recent Post and Courier op-ed pointed out that a nearly a THIRD of our entire state budget comes from the federal government. Like most red states, South Carolina is dependent on federal dollars to function (thanks, California and New York!). Legislative leaders don’t seem in any hurry to deal with the impending budget shortfalls, and in fact, our Governor and other Republicans recently proposed moving to a flat income tax with an eye to eliminating state income tax altogether. Which, what?! The idea that somehow our state government services are bloated and luxurious and should be defunded when our roads look like someone paved over a hog trail and our schools are desperately underfunded and our women are dying in childbirth is just….

Y’all, I can’t even. Let me just tell you that it’s a really bad move to defund everything and dismantle the nascent, fully representative multiethnic democracy we were just starting to build. More protests are scheduled, check your local groups and put April 5^th in Columbia on your schedule. We the people do have the power, it’s time to fully flex it.

To end on good news, Presbyterian College had the pleasure to host Dr. Kathryn Wiley, sociologist and lecturer extraordinaire, for our annual Women’s History Month lecture. If you missed it, here’s a great writeup of the event. Thanks to Dr. Wiley and the Clemson’s Women’s Leadership Program for supporting our little WGST program at PC. If you’d like to support our lecture series going forward, please consider donating here.