S.C. state law keeps Confederate flag flying

Supermajority needed to modify state monuments.

In the hours after a gunman entered a Charleston,S.C.,church and shot nine A frican-A mericans to death during a B ible study,G ov.Nikki H aley ordered all state flags to be lowered and remain at half-staff for nine days.

B ut one banner continues to wave tall at a war memorial on the Capitol grounds — the Confederate flag,a symbol fraught with emotion and political complexity in the Southern state,and one that was apparently celebrated by the alleged shooter,D ylann R oof.

T he reaction from outside observers and activists was swift.Social media commenters insisted that South Carolina remove the flag.“T ake it down now,” wrote the A tlantic’s T a-Nehisi Coates, “Put it in a museum.Inscribe beneath it the years 1861-2015.M ove forward. Save your lovely souls.”

Speaking in Charleston on Friday,Cornell William B rooks,national NA A CP president,demanded the flag be removed,saying that while “some will assert that the Confederate flag is merely a symbol of years gone by,” the flag is “lifted up as an emblem of hate and a tool of hate” and “an inspiration for violence.”

Why can’t state leaders do that?

T hey are not allowed to — not without a two-thirds vote of both houses of the R epublican-controlled state Legislature.A law enacted in 2000,which removed the flag from the dome of the statehouse, also prevents any modifications to state monuments without a supermajority.

T hat part of the law makes it unlikely that such a vote could be successful anytime soon.

“It’s like getting political Ebola,” said D avid Woodard,a longtime R epublican political consultant and professor of political science at Clemson University,of the Confederate flag issue.“A ny time you touch it,you’re going to make more enemies than friends.”

Woodard recalled the hard-fought battle in the late 1990s and early 2000s,when the NA A CP announced a boycott on tourism to the Palmetto State in protest of the flag and the issue became part of the national conversation during the R epublican presidential primary between John M cCain and G eorge W.B ush.

“It was just a very,very tense situation,and you weren’t going to come up with a solution that was going to make everybody happy,” Woodard said.