South Carolina politicians are scrambling this afternoon to broker a deal to remove a Confederate flag from the grounds of the statehouse with less than 24 hours to go before one of its black former members will lie in state there on Wednesday.
Gov. Nikki Haley today accelerated the timetable, meeting with House and Senate leaders ahead of a 4 p.m. press conference. Haley was visibly shaken at a press conference last week announcing the killings of nine inside Emanuel AME Church, seemingly on the verge of breaking down and crying at the rostrum.
House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford, a Democrat, told The Daily Beast that members of both the House and Senate had been in talks since the shooting Wednesday night about the possibility of taking down the flag. Rutherford said he would welcome news from Haley that she wouldn’t veto an effort to take down the flag. On Friday, Rep. Doug Brannon, a Republican, said he had written a bill to take down the bill, but since the regular legislative session ended two weeks ago, getting any new legislation onto the agenda of the extended session has proved tricky.
Brannon said he considered attaching his bill to an existing budget package as a proviso, a special one-year law that would allow the legislature to take the flag down quickly and then vote on a permanent ban when it returns to regular session in January.
“That flag is coming down, and it’s coming down quick,” an excited Brannon told The Daily Beast. Brannon laughed when he thought about facing the voters over taking down the flag.
“I told them I packed light and didn’t plan to stay long.” Read more at The Post and Courier.
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The Post and Courier article lists several other politicians that were present for Haley’s announcement. Two, Sen. Tim Scott and Rep. Jim Clyburn, are African American. Haley herself is the daughter of immigrants from India.
My maternal grandfather was born in South Carolina but left in 1910 after college. He hated the racism and bigotry there. He would be very saddened by last week’s attack but he would be very happy that the Confederate flag is finally going to come down and that non-white politicians in major political offices would be part of that effort.
This is another step of destroying democracy. The Union did not have the legal right to prevent the Confederates from seceding. The flag represents the efforts to secede, and those who died fighting for it – their rights to have their own country, which would remain true to the USA’s founding principles.