SC gov orders lawmakers back to work amid redistricting push. Here’s the cost
Gov. Henry McMaster formally called back South Carolina lawmakers to Columbia to finish their work, including taking up efforts to redraw congressional districts.
Because lawmakers did not end the session Thursday with a sine die agreement in place, the governor is allowed to call them back but technically can’t direct what they work on. He did suggest taking up redistricting, which the House plans to start on the floor Friday.
“An issue of such public importance and interest should not only be debated but also decided by the People’s representatives,” McMaster wrote in his order.
The redistricting push comes as state House Republicans want to redraw the state’s congressional map to go from a 6-1 map to a 7-0 map, with the GOP holding all the state’s U.S. House seats.
It comes as President Donald Trump wants GOP led states to redistrict in the middle of the decade to limit expected midterms losses.
Three days of a special session would cost $202,795 in the House. The amount it would cost the state Senate was not immediately available.
But without a sine die agreement, any topic could be brought up.
So chamber leadership may try to limit what can actually come up after lawmakers come to a resolution on redistricting.
The House appointed three members to a conference committee to discuss the sine die resolution and could potentially come up with a sine die agreement that only allows the budget and any bills in conference committee to come up after the redistricting issue is resolved.
The Senate has yet to appoint members to the conference committee.
“The House has always wanted to control what it does as a body, and it’s why the sine die resolution came to being in the wake of Mark Sanford’s administration,” said state Rep. Micah Caskey, R-Lexington, who chairs the House Rules Committee. “I think the House is simply doing what it has always done, which is to try to control its own future.”
This will keep a protracted debate on issues such as from abortion from happening.
It also puts the legislative leadership in charge of when they come back to session.
“Then the speaker and the (senate) president decide when we come back for conference reports (and) the budget,” House Majority Leader Davey Hiott said.
Because the two chambers were unable to agree on a deal to come back, it’s unclear if lawmakers could work out such an agreement in conference committee on the sine die agreement, Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey said.
The last time McMaster had to call lawmakers back was in 2023 when the two chambers did not come to an agreement on what to take up over a disagreement of who would be appointed as comptroller general.
When McMaster called them back was determined in conjunction with legislative leadership.
For months leadership in the State House and the governor showed no interest in engaging in a middecade redistricting. But after the decision on Louisiana’s maps, the White House renewed its push for states to redistrict.
“Something’s happened, and it has been a complete 180 on this issue,” Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey said. “So I think you know if you’re going to, if you’re going to flip-flop on something like that, it would have been a whole lot better for everybody if you’d have just done it a few months ago and to have given time to plan this do it the right way.”
Massey has stayed adamantly against redistricting.
“Based on what I’ve seen this week, I think the governor’s going to do whatever he’s told to do, and so whatever that looks like, I don’t know,” Massey said. “There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of pushback or backbone downstairs this week.”
This story was originally published May 14, 2026 at 5:39 PM.
