As he leaves SC politics, GOP lawmaker wonders if his party can — or should — be saved

South Carolina Rep. Gary Clary considers himself an anachronism in the Republican Party.

“I’m like seeing a fossil,” he said.

Clary, 72, decided not to run for re-election this fall after three terms representing Pickens County in the South Carolina House of Representatives because he wanted to avoid the bruising debates expected in the next term over budget problems and redistricting. But more importantly, he felt God told him it was time to do something else.

Breaking with his party, he’s supporting Joe Biden for president and is working with organizations founded specifically to defeat Donald Trump in November. He’s the legislative outreach chairman for National Republicans, a group of Reagan-Bush Republicans who say they’re loyal to Lincoln, to offer support to elected officials who feel the same way. He’s working with the Lincoln Project, whose frequent videos on social media skewer the president and his agenda.

Clary is also working with an exploratory committee to see if it’s time for a new Republican Party like the old one used to be, also in the vein of the Reagan-Bush era.

“I’m not sure the Republican Party can be saved under the current circumstances, or whether it should be,” he said this week, just days before his six-year State House tenure comes to an end.

Clary isn’t exactly a mainstream Republican politician. He calls himself a fiscal conservative with a social conscience, one who stands for small government, but one who helps people who can’t help themselves. He doesn’t think laws on high-powered rifles violate the United States Constitution. He believes in climate change.

Former U.S. Congressman Bob Inglis, a Republican who represented Upstate South Carolina in the 1990s and 2000s, has enlisted Clary’s help with RepublicEN, which Inglis founded to combat climate change.

“I place a high value on political courage, and that’s why I’m such a Gary Clary fan,” said Inglis, who lost his seat in Congress in 2010 for talking about the impacts of climate change.

Inglis said Clary will lead a group of conservative elected officials on a field trip to show them where climate change has already harmed the Upstate. Professors from Clary’s alma mater, Clemson University, will explain the science. The date has not been selected, nor have the officials.

All of his new agenda seems out of step with many Republicans.. But Clary is the guy who went to the State House in 2014 with a desire to get the Confederate flag removed from the State House grounds.

The Confederate flag

It was 2014, and Clary was driving with fellow freshman state Rep. Neal Collins from the Upstate to Columbia for their first legislative luncheon. Both had been elected barely a month before.

When Collins asked Clary about his number one issue, Clary said it was removing the Confederate flag from the State House grounds.

There was a long silence from Collins, then he said, “Hope that’s in your last term.”

Then on June 17, 2015, seven months after the election, a self-proclaimed white supremacist shot and killed nine people, including State Sen. Clementa Pinckney, at a Bible study at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. The murderer had photos of himself on social media with a Confederate flag.

Public sentiment about the flag began to change.

Clary and state Rep. Doug Brannon, a Republican from Spartanburg, called for the removal of the flag from the State House. Brannon cautioned Clary it could cost him his seat. Clary was undeterred.

Three weeks later, on July 7, 2015, Clary and Brannon introduced a bill to take the Confederate battle flag down.

The Senate had passed its bill 37-3 on June 24, 2015, the week before.

The next days were grueling, with House members proposing all sorts of amendments to lessen the impact and possibly to kill the bill itself. Impassioned speeches espoused the significance of the flag as honoring the heritage of those who defended the South in the Civil War.

Clary rose on the House floor to talk about his great-great grandfather who was killed during the war in the second battle at Manassas, Virginia.

“I understand that part,” he said.

He talked about seeing “whites only” signs in a neighborhood grocery owned by a member of the Ku Klux Klan and crosses burned in the adjacent lot. This, while he played with the Black children who lived nearby but could not attend his school.

“It’s the idea of fundamental fairness,” Clary said in an interview Thursday.

Heritage or pain?

He annoyed some of his House colleagues when he said on MSNBC it would take intestinal fortitude for them to vote “yes” to removing the flag.

“Where one person’s heritage starts and stops, another one’s hurt and pain begins,” he said Thursday.

The final vote in the House was 94 in favor, 20 opposed.

It was early morning on July 9, 2015. Clary said he looked around the chamber and saw colleagues Leola Robinson-Simpson and Gilda Cobb Hunter, Lonnie Hosey and Bill Clyburn. Some were crying.

“I’ve tried to imagine what it would be like to be Black,” he said. “I can’t. I can’t ever experience the episodes and incidents they did.”

But he knew they would never have to walk down the steps of the State House and see that flag as they went to lunch. He told his wife that night if he never accomplished anything else as a legislator, he was OK with that.

Clary went on to serve two more terms, considering such issues as offshore oil drilling, Department of Corrections reform, education, affordable housing — the list is long.

But that July day, he said, remains etched in his memory. He had been part of righting a wrong.

This story was originally published September 18, 2020 at 5:00 AM.