A Republican You’ve
Never Heard of Points the Way
May 17, 2026
By David French
Opinion
Columnist
Last Tuesday, the
Republican majority leader of the South Carolina Senate, Shane Massey, stood before his colleagues and gave a speech that
exemplified two virtues that can seem almost extinct in the Trump Republican
Party: wisdom and courage.
Days before, he had
received a call from President Trump asking for his support for a midterm
gerrymander in South Carolina. Trump wants South Carolina to follow the lead of
Texas, Tennessee and other Republican-led states to try to wipe out as many
Democratic districts as possible.
But Senator Massey said
no. He would not agree to gerrymander Democrats out of existence in South
Carolina. Specifically, he vowed — and voted — to protect James Clyburn’s
district. Clyburn is the only Black member of the House from
South Carolina.
And when Massey said no, he didn’t
just defy a president; he defied many of his Republican colleagues and he
undoubtedly defied many of his own constituents. He made his speech one week
after Indiana primary voters defeated at least five
Republican state senators who’d refused to gerrymander their state further.
South Carolina is
already heavily gerrymandered. Democrats usually get roughly 40 percent of the
statewide vote in presidential elections, but the state has six Republican
districts and one Democratic district.
Massey’s speech is
notable not just for its defiance, but for its depth. Using the plain, populist
language of a Southern politician (there are lots of y’alls in there), he made
both a principled and a pragmatic case for American pluralism.
Before we get rolling on
the speech itself, I should mention that Massey is no Republican squish. In the
speech, he calls himself a “rabid partisan.” He agreed that Washington
Democrats are “crazy.” He said some Democratic ideas are “wacky.” He included a
flattering reference to one of South Carolina’s favorite sons, John C. Calhoun.
For those who aren’t
familiar with Calhoun, he was one of America’s most reprehensible politicians.
He almost split the Union before the Civil War, and he referred to slavery as a
“positive good.” Massey also said: “I’ve got too much Southern in my blood.
I’ve got too much resistance in my heritage” to capitulate to pressure. This is
not a man who’s about to switch parties.
At the same time, however, Massey
recognizes that there are issues that transcend partisan politics and that
legislators don’t just exist to exercise power. They should also, well,
safeguard the Republic, including by upholding the letter and spirit of the
Constitution. If any American faction tries to crush its opponents through the
use of raw power rather than debating and defeating its opponents in the
marketplace of ideas, then it places the American system under intolerable
strain.
It’s worth
watching the entire speech,
but you can also boil it down to a few simple points.
First, our system was
designed to divide power not only between the different branches of the federal
government, but also between the federal government and the sovereign states.
Trump should not dominate the federal government, and he should not dominate
the state of South Carolina.
“The separation of
powers may actually be the most important governmental doctrine that has been
created in the history of man,” Massey said. “It is that important. And what
the Congress has done to relinquish their authority to the executive is
terrible. And we all see the results of that.”
As for South Carolina,
there is “another brilliant creation, and that is of federalism and the
sovereignty of the states. I don’t want to be a participant in further eroding
federalism and further diminishing the essential role of states.”
Second, Republicans in
South Carolina should not try to destroy the Democratic Party in their home
state. In fact, Massey made an argument that we rarely hear any politician
make. “I will tell my Republican friends: Republicans are stronger when the
Democrat Party is vibrant and viable,” Massey said. “We are. Competition makes
you better, y’all.”
People often say that America needs
two healthy parties. This is a matter of common sense. In a two-party system,
power will change hands regularly, and if power is lurching between the
competent and the incompetent, between the honest and the corrupt, then the
system will not just tip out of balance sometimes, but will be inherently
unstable.
We don’t often think,
however, that healthy political parties can make each other better. Yet this
also makes sense. To defeat a viable opponent, a party has to rise to the
challenge. It has to fix its failures. It has to innovate. Defeating a
sclerotic rump of a party is no achievement. Instead, one-party rule enables
corruption. It fosters stagnation.
This is human nature. If
you take a test that you know you’re going to pass, how hard do you study? If
you run a race that you’re guaranteed to win, how hard do you push yourself?
Third, Massey dealt
directly with one of the most pernicious arguments in politics: You should try
to crush your opponents because if the roles were reversed, then they would
surely try to crush you. You should, in other words, engage in pre-emptive retaliation
for an imagined offense.
What was Massey’s
response to the claim that the Democrats in South Carolina would do the same
thing to Republicans if they had the chance? “I would hope that wouldn’t be the
case, but I’m not naïve. My larger question, though: Is that the way it should happen?
‘They do it to you, so you should do it to them?’ Do unto others as you believe
they would do unto you? Is that it?”
“I don’t remember that being the
context in the Gospel of Matthew,” he said, “and I don’t think the Messiah
meant it only as something to apply to children, but how we interact with each
other.”
Fourth, he made a point
that every American leader should remember. This nation — the most powerful in
the world — cannot be conquered by an outside foe, but it can destroy itself.
And it will destroy itself if it abandons its founding principles and its
founding values. “Maybe we become convinced that the only way to preserve the
Republic is to implement policies that are contrary to the founding ideas of
the Republic,” he worried. “Maybe we turn on ourselves. Maybe 250 years in,” we
will no longer be able to keep our Republic.
I know that I disagree
with Senator Massey on many things, not least on his regard for Calhoun, much
less on being a rabid partisan, but if we’re going to get through this terrible
national moment, we cannot rely only on our own political allies or a single
political party. Our Republic will have to be rescued by people who voted for
Trump three times, alongside people who resisted him from Day 1.
I also know that Massey
is engaged in an almost certainly doomed struggle. His vote —
along with those of four of his Republican colleagues — denied Republicans the
two-thirds majority they needed to continue the legislative session and move
forward with redistricting.
On Thursday, however,
the Republican governor, Henry McMaster, called a special session, and a new
congressional map can pass with a simple majority vote.
When I speak in public, I’m often
asked what gives me hope. My answer comes from unexpected people in unexpected
places who demonstrate uncommon virtue.
At the grand scale, I
think of the Ukrainian comedian who has defied the Russian bear. I think of the vice president
who found his voice when
an angry mob came for his head. I think of a Canadian prime minister who stood
up to a president and articulated a compelling vision for preserving the free world.
But the smaller battles
matter as well. And now I think of a Republican state senator who knew he would
probably lose (and might lose his seat as well), but made his stand
nonetheless.
And he made a statement
that I’ve longed to hear in the age of Trump: “If we’re going to lose this
radical idea of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition
that all men are created equal, a nation that in its Constitution guarantees to
each state a republican form of government to ensure the debate of ideas — if
that’s going to happen, Mr. President, by God, it’s not going to be because I
surrendered it.”
“I’m voting no.”
