Category Archives: Legislature

Bobby Harrell’s excellent column today

Bobby Harrell’s op-ed piece in The State today was quite good. Not just because I agree with it. In fact, there is nothing remarkable in that. Pretty much everyone from all parts of the political spectrum holds the view I do on the stimulus — that now that it is a fact and we will have to pay for it, we must make sure that South Carolina gets every penny of its share. Only a tiny band of reality-denying ideologues disagrees. Unfortunately, one of them is our governor. Our state is cursed in that regard.

But I often read columns that I agree with, and wish I didn’t, because they are so weak. They actually harm the cause. Not so in this case. Bobby does a pretty decent job. I wonder if it was this good when he turned it in, or whether Cindi (who has handled local op-eds since Mike left last year) made it this good editing it. Whichever is the case, I liked it.

Set aside the issue of whether Marie Antoinette actually said the thing about letting the peasants eat cake (she probably did not). I find often that the lead anecdote or analogy is the weakest part of an otherwise good column. And in this case, the idea expressed is sound, even if the historical reference is not.

The speaker sets the governor’s nonsense against hard reality, such as when he invites the governor to seek out the places where he thinks government is growing:

If he really thinks we are somehow growing spending by 11 percent this year, I invite the governor to visit the schools, police stations and disability care facilities and see for himself the reductions — not expansions — they are having to make.

And of course, the governor’s assertion that government is growing will NOT stand up to scrutiny at the rubber-meets-the-road level.

Then, he rather deftly takes away the one thing even many of the governor’s detractors would concede him — his ideological purity — by pointing out his inconsistency:

While Gov. Sanford has made it clear that he adamantly opposes taking this education and law enforcement stimulus money, he has at the same time already accepted all the other funds that he can out of the remaining 90 percent of the $8 billion in stimulus money and tax cuts coming to our state.

It makes no sense for the governor to cherry-pick the funds he will accept — such as the $50 million to make buildings more energy-efficient that he requested the other week — and oppose money for teachers and law enforcement officers on so-called “philosophical” grounds. This is inconsistent with any kind of viewpoint and goes against what most people would consider to be common sense.

Finally, he explains why the governor’s oft-repeated claim that lawmakers could avoid deep cuts simply by following the budget HE recommended months ago simply doesn’t fit reality:

These budgetary facts are not some form of “scare tactics,” as the governor claims. Pointing to his executive budget written months ago, the governor says he was able to fund key areas of government without stimulus money. But what he doesn’t tell you is that he also had $254 million more in state funds than budget writers have available today because the Board of Economic Advisors has twice lowered the revenue estimates since then.

Given the quarter of a billion dollars less in state funds that we have to write a budget with, the only thing scary about these facts is the reality of the situation — a reality Gov. Sanford doesn’t seem to grasp.

On the whole, a good piece.

FEELING like I’m 100 years old

Here’s the problem with live blogging and twittering and all that (which is the same as the problem with 24/7 TV “news”) — if I were to write what I’m actually seeing and thinking and experiencing, I’d write stuff like this from sitting in the gallery at the SC Senate:

  • The guy who reads the bills aloud sounds a lot like Richard Gergel — but he’s not Richard Gergel.
  • We just spent a long time being introduced to a 100-year-old lady by Jake Knotts. One of the things I learned about her (I think) is that she was once John Spratt’s schoolteacher. She was presented with a framed resolution, and the senators sang “Happy Birthday” to her. All this was explained when Jake said, “Miz Kennedy still votes, and you know who she votes for.” Well, bless her heart.
  • The senators THEN sang “Happy Birthday” to Hugh Leatherman, after he blew out a candle atop a stack of donuts. A senator explained that this “cake” consisted of 70 donuts, adding that “Each donut represents $1 million in stimulus we’re not going to get.” I guess he meant $10 million.
  • Kulturkampf was alive and well in the chamber, as one senator got up and said if we were going to protect children from smoking in cars, we should also protect UNBORN children from smoke in cars. An objection was voiced, so that was set aside.

And so forth, and so on. I came hoping to hear something about Vincent Sheheen’s proposal to get the stimulus funds in spite of the governor. But I either missed it (which I think is what happened), or they’re just too busy with “more important” stuff.

This is why I was an editor all these years — so somebody else could sit through all this stuff, and get to me when something actually happened.

An hour of this can make you FEEL like you’re 100 years old…

Doug Jennings and the teachers


After the pro-stimulus rally Wednesday, I walked up the State House steps (which was tiring; I really need to start working out again) to chat with Doug Jennings from Bennettsville. Doug and I go way back. His daddy was my doctor when I was a kid, the one year that I attended B’ville High School (yes, I was a Green Gremlin).

Anyway, a moment later these two teachers followed me up a moment later, and started expressing their indignation over the governor refusing to take the stimulus money to Doug. I pass it on for four reasons:

It expresses the frustration that many South Carolinians — not just schoolteachers — feel over the governor’s position.

It shows the powerlessness that lawmakers — not just Democrats like Doug — also feel over the issue. They’re watching something they just can’t quite believe, and can’t seem to do anything about it.

It shows something else as well. You’ll note that Doug says something along the lines of, you see what we’ve been dealing with all these years? The stubborn absurdity of the governor’s position is not really a new thing for folks at the State House. As bad as the situation is, at least lawmakers can take comfort from the fact that THIS time, regular voters out there finally see what the guy is like.

It actually turned out to be fairly decent video, even though it was shot on my phone. Yes, the medium IS the message.

Sorry I haven’t written a “column” for this week. You wouldn’t believe how busy unemployed people can be. I was going to write something about what a shame it is that some of the public expressions on this stimulus issue are so tainted with partisanship, which is unnecessary and harmful. Here we are with a situation in which most Republicans agree with Democrats on the essentials — that since the stimulus DID pass, and we’re going to have to pay for it, it’s total lunacy even to contemplate South Carolina not getting its badly needed share.

And yet we have this rally Wednesday at which nary a Republican was to be seen (Jake Knotts doesn’t count; he’s sort of a Huey Long Democrat lost in time), enabling critics to brush it off as a partisan affair. Then we have Jim Clyburn picking a fight with, of all people, Lindsey Graham, who wants us to get the money.

I’ve seldom seen a time in which Democrat and Republican leaders have more of a common purpose — with only a handful coalescing around the governor — and yet they can’t seem to get it together and present a united front on the issue. Which is very sad, given the stakes involved for our state.

That’s what I was going to write a column about. So let’s just say I did, OK?

Drowning time for state government

Maybe y’all can explain this to me, since I have no morning editorial board meeting at which I would ask Cindi and Warren to answer this question: “In what sense is this alleged ‘deal’ Mark Sanford is offering on the stimulus a compromise?”

Let’s see — he doesn’t want the $700 million spent to “grow government,” which is the phrase used on his home planet for what English speakers call “restoring some of the cuts to essential services.” He wants to devote the money instead to “paying down debt,” which means many things in Sanfordese, including paying “debt” that won’t even be incurred for a generation — anything, absolutely anything, other than spending the money on immediate needs.

And the Obama administration said no, then when he absurdly asked the same question again (the governor is not bothered by repeating himself; he doesn’t get bored), it said hell no with added language to the effect of, “what part of ‘stimulus’ don’t you understand?”

So now he’s offering a “deal” whereby the Legislature spends that money, but sets aside an equal amount from other sources — which means money that we taxpayers paid for state services we expect — to “pay down debt.” So he gets, let’s see, everything that he wants, and the state doesn’t get anything it needs from that part of the stimulus.

Oh, and by they way, you have to go ahead and make every cut in spending that HE wants, and you can take your deliberative process and stuff it down the oubliette.

That’s my understanding, anyway.

By the way, for those of you who don’t understand the governor’s thinking on all this, let me explain it to you. You’ve no doubt heard that the governor’s ideological ally Grover Norquist wants to shrink government “to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” (Oh, and if you follow that link and think, “Mother Jones! What do expect from a left-wing rag?”, allow me to explain that when Grover came to visit with our editorial board a few years back, he brought at copy of that article with him to make sure we’d seen it. He’s proud of what they wrote about him.)

The recent drastic cuts to state agencies are just catnip to the governor and Grover and their ilk. Once you get government down to where services suffer, they can point to it and say, “See how ineffective government is! What did I tell you?” That gives support to their argument that we “waste” even less money on gummint, thereby making it even less effective… and pretty soon, it’s drowning time.

Our governor isn’t about to let some meddling Obama administration drain the tub right when state government is going down for the third time. This is the moment he’s been waiting for.

How much is this foolishness costing us?

Just a quick reaction to this message received this afternoon:

Members of the Press – we just had a very important Senate Finance Committee meeting regarding the state budget and the federal stimulus money.

In an initial Finance Committee budget meeting today Chairman Hugh Leatherman instructed subcommittee chairmen to work into the night creating a budget without federal stimulus funds. He has instructed the chairmen to cut $370 from the House budget, including $161 Million from K-12 education and $44 Million from higher education.

The Finance Committee will reconvene tomorrow at 9:00 am to review the proposed cuts in Gressette Rm 105.

Please email me with any questions.

– Wesley Donehue
SC Senate Republican Caucus

I wonder how much this insanity of Sanford forcing the Legislature to do TWO budgets is costing us, in staff time and such? Drafting the budget each year is the biggest, hairiest lifting the General Assembly does. And they’re having to do it TWICE, because of the bizarre whims of one man?

Higher education funding in S.C., by the numbers

xxx
By BRAD WARTHEN
brad@bradwarthen.com


For once, let’s start off with some numbers and dates:

· 17 percent – the amount of the University of South Carolina’s funding that now comes from state appropriations. Our state’s major research universities now get less than a fifth of their funding from state appropriations. In recent years, those in the know have stopped calling them “state institutions” and started calling them “state-assisted.” We’ve now reached the point at which even that seems like an overstatement.

· 1st – South Carolina’s ranking in percentage of higher education funding cut last year. South Carolina, before the December and March reductions, had cut 17.7 percent from higher education budgets. (After those cuts, it has slashed higher ed budgets 24 percent.) The second worst state was Alabama, at 10.5 percent.

· 38th – Our state’s ranking for higher ed funding before the past year’s nation-leading cuts.

· 1995 – The last year that state appropriations, as a dollar amount, equaled the current level, before adjusting for inflation.

· 1973 – The year that matches the current level of funding, once you adjust for inflation. (Think for a moment what North Carolina and Georgia have done in higher education since 1973, pulling light years ahead of South Carolina.)

· $29 million – The value of one grant (from the National Institutes of Health) brought in by a single one of the 13 endowed chair holders at the Medical University of South Carolina.

· 25 – New technology companies started by USC faculty in the years since the endowed chairs program started, which places the university 19th among public institutions in the nation in number of start-ups.

· 50,000 – S.C. jobs provided directly or indirectly by USC.

· 11 percent – South Carolina unemployment rate in February.

· 43rd – South Carolina’s national ranking for percentage of adult population with college educations.

Those are a few of the figures I picked up from the presentations that Clemson President James Barker, Medical University of South Carolina President Ray Greenberg and USC President Harris Pastides (joined by Garrison Walters, executive director of the state Commission on Higher Education) made to a joint meeting Wednesday of two Senate panels that deal with higher education funding, such as it is.

They were there to try to stop the bleeding, and to send the message that dealing a further blow to these institutions’ already last-in-the-nation funding by not accepting federal stimulus funds would be beyond insane (my wording, I hope you’ll note, not theirs).

In some cases, they had requests that bore specifically upon their respective institutions. For instance, Dr. Greenberg’s wish listed included a request that if tuition is capped, graduate and professional programs will be exempted. But in keeping with the extraordinary collaboration that has marked the interaction of the three presidents in recent years (which is no less than miraculous, given the petty, wasteful, tit-for-tat competition that characterized the decades that went before), he also cited priorities shared by all: Regulatory relief (which President Barker has explained as minimizing cost by requiring the schools to jump through two or three hoops instead of six every time they make a move); a state bond bill for capital needs; and passing the cigarette tax increase, with a major portion of the revenue going to Medicaid. OK, so maybe that last one has the most immediate effect on the medical university, but its benefits to the entire state are so obvious as to absolve it of parochialism.

And they had a sympathetic audience. “You’re number one in the country,” in budget cuts, Sen. Nikki Setzler noted. “If that isn’t a challenge to this committee to carry forward to the full General Assembly, then shame on us.”

Of course, Sen. Setzler is a Democrat, but that doesn’t count for as much of a difference in the S.C. Senate as it does in some venues. And when it comes to the federal stimulus upon which the GOP leadership is completely dependent for keeping essential state services running, there are only two sides – on one is Gov. Mark Sanford and a few allies to whom ideology is the only reality; on the other the vast majority of lawmakers.

Republicans don’t come more conventionally conservative than Senate Education Chairman John Courson, to whom Ronald Reagan was a demigod. And here’s what he had to say about the stimulus: “If we don’t accept that money, it does not go back to the Treasury; it goes to other states.” Which is just common sense, of course – nothing ideological about it. But this is a moment in South Carolina history when commonsense statements are in pathetically short supply, so every one uttered takes on added value. In an interview later, Sen. Courson explained the rationale adopted by most Republicans whose top priority is not posturing for national media: He opposed the stimulus bill when it was being debated in Washington. There’s a lot in it he doesn’t like; if he had been a member of Congress he would have voted against it. But that’s all over now. It’s a fact, and South Carolinians are going to be paying for it along with everyone else. Therefore, not taking the money makes no sense at all.

Tuition cost was on the senators’ minds, and well it should be, now that the bulk of higher education costs is on students and their families rather than state taxpayers. “I am pledging to keep any tuition increase for next year to a minimum,” said Dr. Pastides. “I’m keenly aware of the burden that a tuition increase would put on students and their families.”

But what happens with tuition depends upon the General Assembly’s actions – and the governor’s. “Will tuition and fees increase next year?” President Barker asked rhetorically. “The answer is: Almost certainly, but the level of increase is very dependent on what happens with state funding. Tuition is Clemson’s last-resort response….”

Mr. Barker pointed out that the effect of stimulus money on tuition is not direct, since he, like the other presidents, would use stimulus money for one-time, not recurring, expenses. But when asked by Sen. Harvey Peeler the expected effect upon the institutions of not accepting the stimulus money, the Clemson president said it “would be devastating.”

Other senators, seizing upon that word, asked other witnesses whether they agreed with it, prompting Dr. Pastides to oblige them by saying for the record, “It will be devastating, and it will have an effect on tuition” if the stimulus is blocked.

Normally, I’m not what you’d call a numbers guy; words are my thing. So I appreciate that the senators were groping for just the right word to describe the situation. But in this case, for once, the numbers impress me more. We are so far behind in our state. And if our governor has his way, we’ll take an additional giant leap backward.

This is my first weekly online-only column after leaving The State. Watch for more here on bradwarthen.com.

Leatherman’s letter to Sanford

Folks, here’s a copy of the letter that Hugh Leatherman wrote to Sanford about the stimulus. Don’t know what to add except that his point, that South Carolinians will pay for this stimulus whether we get the money or not, is one that I heard Republican senators making yesterday at the State House.

Hardly seems worth mentioning because it’s so painfully obvious. To everyone but Sanford. Did you read the short item in the paper today about what Bobby Harrell had to say?

COLUMBIA, S.C. — House Speaker Bobby Harrell said Wednesday South Carolina lawmakers should prepare a budget without using federal stimulus cash unless Gov. Mark Sanford reverses himself and decides to seek the money.

“We’re probably not going to have that money with the governor not requesting it,” Harrell, R-Charleston, said. “It is time to write a budget that does not include that money.”

But Sanford spokesman Joel Sawyer said it is time for legislators to sit down with the governor and come up with a budget plan that uses $700 million stimulus cash the governor will control during the next two years to pay down state debt or forgoes the federal cash altogether through budget cuts. “So far, they’ve not indicated a willingness to do so.”…

That comment from Joel really gets me. He might as well say, “The governor has invited lawmakers to poke every citizen of South Carolina in the eye with a sharp stick, but so far, they’ve not indicated a willingness to do so…”

Good job rejecting the tuition caps

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This might sound strange coming from a guy who was already counting pennies (or quarters, anyway — I miscounted how many I had this morning in my truck, and ended up with a parking ticket because I didn't have enough for the meter), with my two youngest daughters still in college. And now I'm about to be unemployed.

But I'm glad the House rejected tuition caps at S.C. colleges and universities. I have an anecdote to share about that.

Remember the recent day when college students wandered the State House lobbying lawmakers on behalf of their institutions. They wanted the state to invest in higher education the way North Carolina and Georgia have. Either that day, or the day after, I had lunch with Clemson President James Barker, and he told me an anecdote he had witnessed: He said the students were pressing a lawmaker NOT to support the tuition caps, because they were worried about their institutions being even more underfunded — they hardly get anything from the state — some are down below 20 percent funding by the state, and the rest has to come from such sources as tuition, federal research grants and private gifts. Eliminate the ability to raise tuition, and the institution's ability to provide an excellent education is significantly curtailed. If we want lower tuitions, the state should go back to funding higher percentages of the schools' budgets, the way our neighboring states with better higher ed systems do.

The lawmaker listened to the kids, and then said with great condescension, maybe you kids don't care if tuition goes up, but I'll bet your parents would like a cap. He thought he had them there, but the kids set him straight: None of their parents were paying the bills. These kids were working their way through schools and paying for it all themselves. And they didn't want to see the quality of what they were working so hard to pay for be degraded by an artificial cap on tuition. The lawmaker had not counted on getting that answer.

I wish I had been there to see it, because I've been in a similar place before. Back in 95 or 96, Speaker Wilkins had brought his committee chairs to see us, and I started challenging the wisdom of their massive rollback of property taxes paid for school.One of them allowed as how he bet I was glad to get that couple of hundred dollars I didn't have to pay. And I answered him that I was ashamed that I was paying so little through my property tax to support schools that I knew needed more resources. He said smugly that he was sure I wouldn't want to give it back. I told him I didn't see as how there was any channel for doing that, but if he could point me to the right person who would take my money and see it gets to the right place, I would pay the difference. He didn't have a good answer for that.

It would be great if our lawmakers would stop assuming that all of us in South Carolina are so greedily shortsighted that we can't see past our personal desire to pay less money, and that we are corruptible by a scheme to starve colleges of reasonable support.

A secessionist Freudian slip

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My favorite part of the concurrent resolution described in my last post is this:

Whereas, the several states of the Untied States of America, through
the Constitution and the amendments thereto, constituted a general
government for special purposes and delegated to that government
certain definite powers, reserving each state to itself, the residuary
right to their own self government. Now, therefore,

Yep, you read that right, and all I did was copy and paste if from the online text of H. 3509. It does indeed say "the Untied States of America."

Hey, if you can't break up the Union one way…

Nullification: Are we going to do it again?

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Michael Rodgers over at "Take Down The Flag" is worried that we are, with S.C. House bill 3509, which seeks a concurrent resolution. And you know, you can easily see why he would think that, given such language as this:

Whereas, the South Carolina General Assembly declares that the people
of this State have the sole and exclusive right of governing themselves
as a free, sovereign, and independent State, and shall exercise and
enjoy every power, jurisdiction, and right pertaining thereto, which is
not expressly delegated by them to the United States of America in the
congress assembled; and
…

I found that "sole and exclusive right" bit interesting, with the way it seemed to brush aside the federalist notion of shared sovereignty. That language seems to go beyond the purpose stated in the summary, which is:

TO AFFIRM THE RIGHTS OF ALL STATES INCLUDING SOUTH CAROLINA BASED ON
THE PROVISIONS OF THE NINTH AND TENTH AMENDMENTS TO THE UNITED STATES
CONSTITUTION.

The point being, of course, that since we do HAVE the Ninth and 10th amendments, every word of this resolution is superfluous unless it means to negate federal authority in some way not currently set out in law.

And a certain neo-Confederate sensibility is suggested with the very first example of the sort of action on the part of the federal government that would constitute an abridgement of the Constitution under this resolution:

(1)    establishing martial law or a state of emergency within one of
the states comprising the United States of America without the consent
of the legislature of that state;…

As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up: The bill's sponsors are indeed suggesting that this resolution is needed to declare that we won't let Reconstruction be reinstituted.

Because, you know, that Obama is such a clear and present danger. Or something. I guess.

Of course, not everyone is shocked, appalled or amused at the notion of a new nullification movement. Check out this op-ed piece we recently ran online, about Mark Sanford and nullification.

This is worse than Facebook

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You know how I've complained about how I just don't get Facebook — that I find it disorienting, and just generally a lousy way to communicate information?

Well, I've found a worse way — Twitter.

Have you seen this new site that S.C. Rep. Dan Hamilton and self-described GOP "political operative" Wesley Donehue have started, SCTweets? Basically, its point is:

…to find a creative way to showcase SC’s tech-savvy elected officials.
Specifically, we expect the Statehouse crew to be twittering a lot from
the floor and we thought it would be cool to see what they were saying.
That goal somehow expanded and we decided to showcase all South
Carolina politicos with our directory. We then gave them a way to
interact through #sctweets.

Look, I don't mean to criticize Messrs. Hamilton and Donehue at all. I appreciate the effort. Go for it. But when I try to obtain any sort of information of value from a series of incomplete, typo-ridden sentence fragments from a bunch of people ranging from Anton Gunn to David Thomas to Bob Inglis to Nathan Ballentine to Thad Viers, with a lot of Blogosphere usual suspects such as Mattheus Mei thrown in, I feel like I've trying to get nutrition from a bowl of Lucky Charms mixed with Cracker Jack with cotton candy and Pop Rocks on top, stirred with a Slim Jim. Just a jumble of junk.

The "authors" aren't to blame. It's the medium. I'm still waiting to find any value in this Twitter thing. I suspect I'll be waiting a long time.

What do I consider to be GOOD way to communicate information? Well, here's a coincidence: I actually looked at my Facebook page this morning, and as usual got little out of it. But I noticed where a friend I worked with a quarter-century ago posted something that seemed a deliberate illustration of the incoherence of Facebook. He exhorted readers to:

* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions in a note to your wall.

So I followed his instructions (except for the posting part). The book nearest to my laptop was the literally dog-eared (chewed by a dog that died three decades ago) paperback Byline: Ernest Hemingway. Here's the fifth sentence on page 56 (if you count the incomplete, continued sentence at the top of the page as the first):

"He smiled like a school girl, shrugged his shoulders and raised his hands to his face in a mock gesture of shame."

And you know what? I got more out of that than I got out of that Twitter page. At least I formed a clear, coherent picture of something.

It occurs to me that Twitter is the bright new world that that Colorado congressman who claims credit for killing The Rocky Mountain News extols. And then it occurs to me that to the extent he is right, to the extent that this is the future of political communication, we are in a lot of trouble int his country…

Much ado about photo ID (column version)

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    Yep, you already read this here, back on Friday. But I post it not for you blog regulars, but for folks who saw it first in the paper today, and decided to come here for the version with links.

    And if you did that, welcome to the blog…

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR

The photo ID bill that caused such a flap in the House Thursday is one of those classic issues that political partisans make a huge deal over, and that seems to me entirely undeserving of the fuss.
    It’s not so much an issue that generates conflict between Democrats and Republicans as it is an issue that is about conflict between the two parties, with little practical impact beyond that.
    The way I see it is this:

  • It’s ridiculous for Democrats to act like this is some kind of insupportable burden on voting, even to the point of walking out to dramatize their profound concern. Why shouldn’t you have to make the kind of basic demonstration of your identity that you have to make for pretty much any other kind of transaction?
  • It’s ridiculous for Republicans to insist that we have to have this safeguard, absent any sort of widespread abuse here in South Carolina in recent elections. Where’s the problem necessitating this big confrontation with the Democrats? I don’t see it.

    Some of my friends and acquaintances defend parties by telling me that they legitimately reflect different philosophies and value systems. Well, when you scratch the surface and get at the values that inform these two overwrought, pointedly partisan reactions, it doesn’t make me feel any better either way. In fact, it reminds me why I can’t subscribe to either party’s world view.
    Democrats believe at their core that it should be easier to vote. I look around me at the kinds of decisions that are sometimes made by voters, and it seems to me sometimes that far too many people who are already voting take the responsibility too lightly. Look at exit polls — or just go up to a few people on the street and ask them a few pointed questions about public affairs. Look at what people actually know about candidates and their positions and the issues, and look at the reasons they say they vote certain ways, and it can be alarming. Hey, I love this American self-government thing, but it’s not perfect, and one of the biggest imperfections is that some folks don’t take their electoral responsibility seriously enough. Why would I want to see the people who are so apathetic that they don’t vote now coming out and voting? Yet that seems to be what many Democrats are advocating, and it disturbs me.
    And beneath all that sanctimony from Republicans about the integrity of the voting process is, I’m sorry to say, something that looks very much like what Democrats are describing, although Democrats do so in overly cartoonish terms. There’s a bit of bourgeois disdain, a tendency among Republicans to think of themselves as the solid, hard-working citizens who play by the rules, and to be disdainful of those who don’t have their advantages — which they don’t see as advantages at all, but merely their due as a result of being so righteous and hard-working. There’s a tendency to see the disadvantaged as being to blame for their plight, as being too lazy or immoral or whatever to participate fully. The idea is that they wouldn’t have these problems if they would just try. What I’m trying to describe here is the thing that is making sincere Republicans’ blood pressure rise even as they’re reading these words. It’s a tendency to attach moral weight to middle-class status. Republicans seem to believe as an article of faith that there are all these shiftless, marginal people out there — relatives of Cadillac-driving welfare queens of the Reagan era, no doubt — wanting to commit voter fraud, and they’ve got to stop it, and if you don’t want to stop it as much as they do, then you don’t believe in having integrity in the process.
    Basically, I’m unimpressed by the holier-than-thou posturing from either side. And I get very tired at all the fuss over something that neither side can demonstrate is all that big a deal. Democrats can’t demonstrate that this is a great injustice, and Republicans can’t demonstrate that it’s needed.
    And yet, all this drama.
    While I’m at it, I might as well abuse a related idea: early voting.
    We’ve had a number of debates about that here on the editorial board, and I’ve been told that my reasons for opposing early voting are vague and sentimental. Perhaps they are, but I cling to them nonetheless.
    While Democrats and Republicans have their ideological reasons to fight over this idea, too, it’s a communitarian thing for me. I actually get all warm and fuzzy, a la Frank Capra, about the fact that on Election Day, my neighbors and I — sometimes folks I haven’t seen in years — take time out from our daily routine and get together and stand in line (actually allowing ourselves to be, gasp, inconvenienced) and act as citizens in a community to make important decisions.
    I’ve written columns celebrating that very experience, such as one in 1998 that quoted a recent naturalized citizen proudly standing in line at my polling place, who said, “On my way here this morning, I felt the solemnity of the occasion.”
    I believe in relating to my country, my state, my community as a citizen, not as a consumer. That calls for an entirely different sort of interaction. If you relate to public life as a consumer, well then by all means do it at your precious convenience. Mail or phone or text it in — what’s the difference? It’s all about you and your prerogatives, right? You as a consumer.
    Something different is required of a citizen, and that requirement is best satisfied by everyone getting out and voting on Election Day.
    With or without photo IDs.

This column is adapted from a post on my blog, which includes a lot of other commentary that did not make it into the paper. For the full experience, please go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Much ado about photo ID

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The photo ID bill that caused such a flap in the House yesterday is one of those classic issues that partisans make a HUGE deal over, and which seems to me entirely undeserving of the fuss.

The way I see it is this:

  • It's ridiculous for Democrats to act like this is some kind of insupportable burden on voting, even to the point of walking out to dramatize their profound concern. Why shouldn't you have to make the kind of basic demonstration of your identity that you have to make for pretty much any other kind of transaction?
  • It's ridiculous for Republicans to insist that we have to have this safeguard, absent any sort of widespread abuse here in South Carolina in recent elections. Where's the problem necessitating this big confrontation with the Democrats? I don't see it.

Some of you defend parties by telling me that they legitimately reflect different philosophies and value systems. Well, when you scratch the surface and get at the values that inform these two overwrought partisan reactions, it doesn't make me feel any better either way. In fact, it reminds me why I can't subscribe to either party's world view.

Democrats believe at their core that it should be EASIER to vote. I look around me at the kinds of decisions that are sometimes made by voters in this country, and it seems to me sometimes that far too many people who are ALREADY voting take the responsibility too lightly. Look at exit polls. (Or forget the exit polls, just try going up to people on the street and asking them a few pointed questions about public affairs.) Look at what people actually know about candidates and their positions and the issues, and look at the reasons why they say they vote certain ways, and it can sometimes be alarming. Hey, I love this self-government thing, but it's not perfect, and one of the imperfections is that some folks don't take their electoral responsibility seriously enough. So why would I want to see the people who are so apathetic that they don't vote NOW coming out and voting? Yet that seems to be what many Democrats are advocating, and it disturbs me.

And beneath all that sanctimony from Republicans about the integrity of the voting process is, I'm sorry to say, something that looks very much like what Democrats are describing, although Democrats do so imperfectly and in overly cartoonish terms. There's a bit of bourgeois disdain in the GOP position on these things. There is a tendency among Republicans to think of themselves as the solid, hard-working citizens who play by the rules, and to be disdainful of those who don't have their advantages — which Republicans don't SEE as advantages at all, but merely their due as a result of being so righteous and hard-working and all. There's a tendency to see the disadvantaged as being to blame for their plight, as being too lazy or immoral or whatever to participate fully. The idea is that they wouldn't have these problems if they would just TRY. What I'm trying to describe here is the thing that is making sincere Republicans' blood pressure rise even as they're reading these words. It's a tendency to attach moral weight to middle-class status. Republicans seem to believe as an article of faith that there are all these shiftless, marginal people out there — relatives of Cadillac-driving welfare queens of the Reagan era, no doubt — wanting to commit voter fraud, and they've got to stop it, and if you don't want to stop it too then you don't believe in having integrity in the process.

So basically, I'm unimpressed by the holier-than-thou posturing from either side. And I get very tired at all the drama over something that NEITHER side can demonstrate is all that big a deal. Democrats can't demonstrate that this is a great injustice, and Republicans can't demonstrate that it's needed. And yet we have to put up with all this drama.

Valerie’s story on Sanford, stimulus

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Somehow I missed, until a release from Jim Clyburn's office, the story that our own Valerie Bauerlein co-wrote in The Wall Street Journal Saturday about Mark Sanford and the stimulus.

Headlined "GOP Governor Sees Danger in States Accepting Stimulus Money," it mostly said what we already knew here in Columbia about the governor's posturing for his national fan club at the expense of South Carolina. But a small detail in the story jumped out at me. It didn't tell me anything new, but it grabbed me nonetheless:

    When the fate of the stimulus bill was still uncertain last week, Mr. Sanford traveled to Washington on Feb. 4 to ask Republican senators to fight it. Most Washington Republicans, in the House as well as the Senate, lined up against the initiative, drawing a sharp distinction with Democrats — though three moderate Republicans joined with all 58 Democrats to propel the recovery package out of the Senate.
    Other Republican governors have been more favorable toward the plan. Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, for example, broke with party leaders by stumping for the proposal with Mr. Obama in Fort Myers on Monday.

Did it hit you, too? I'm talking about this part: "Mr. Sanford traveled to Washington on Feb. 4 to ask Republican senators to fight it…"

We're talking about a guy who, even if you go by HIS account, hasn't been able to find a minute since 2003 to meet with the Employment Security Commission of his own state (he can threaten to fire them, but he can't sit down and talk with them). We're talking about a guy who is notorious for not working with lawmakers of his own party, who meet one floor above his office — even though he CAN find time to carry piglets up there so they can poop all over the nice new carpet.

This same guy finds time to run up to Washington and lobby Republicans up THERE to do what they were going to do anyway, so he can posture for the WSJ as though he had something to do with it.

Meanwhile, back home, he's forcing all sorts of people to go to all kinds of lengths to prepare to work around him because of his sorta, kinda threat to be an obstacle (as Valerie puts it, he's being "coy" about it) to stimulus funds coming to South Carolina, which is ALSO all about him and his posturing.

Of course Valerie reminds us at the end of just how influential Mark Sanford is with Republicans:

But even in Republican-led South Carolina, Mr. Sanford may have difficulty holding the line. Leaders of the GOP-controlled state legislature concede Mr. Sanford's point, but would want to at least accept the $480 million for roads, bridges and other infrastructure the state is eligible for.

Of course they would. That's because they care about South Carolina more than they care about ideological posturing.

Capt. Smith sits this one out

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Ran into James Smith this morning at breakfast, and expressed my surprise that Vincent Sheheen was running for governor and he was not.

He said he just couldn't afford the time away from his family. As you'll recall, he was separated from the wife and four kids for about a year and a half, most of it fighting those folks President Obama calls the Tolly-bon. He said his wife was supportive, but he couldn't stand to miss the time with his kids. He said a Soapbox Derby event over the weekend (or was in Pinewood Derby? I get those mixed up) underlined that for him; if he were to run for gov, he'd miss such events.

On other matters, I mentioned I had thought of him and the other guys of Team Swamp Fox last night, because I've been watching (via Netflix) the HBO series "Generation Kill," based on the book by the same name by a Rolling Stone correspondent embedded with Force Recon Marines on the tip of the spear in the Iraq invasion in '03. The Marines, who were veterans of Afghanistan, talk about that experience a lot, and are sometimes nostalgic because the way they had fought on that front made more sense to them.

Anyway, I need to get together with Rep. Smith sometime and talk at greater length; I haven't had a chance to do that since he got back.

People like that re-form — maybe we should get us some

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Thought y'all might find these two press releases, both having to do with a bill to put the Employment Security Commission under the governor, edifying.

First, we have one from Speaker Bobby Harrell, who manages to damn the governor's performance as an economic developer while faintly praising the notion of putting him in charge:

    "This is just another example of the House’s many efforts to restructure and
streamline government. Given recent events, we feel this is the right thing to
do and the proper time to do it.  Moving
the Employment Security Commission under a Department of Workforce will increase
efficiencies and the sharing of crucial employment data but this move alone will
not solve our state’s third worst in the nation unemployment rate, that solution
depends more on job creation not job placement. 
That being said, placing both job creation and job placement agencies
under the executive branch should provide another tool the Governor can use to
take the steps necessary to lower our state’s 9.5% unemployment rate."

… since he obviously hasn't been able to do it yet, he doesn't quite say. As you know, Bobby's never thought a whole lot of the performance of the gov's Commerce Department.

But as much fun as it may be to pick that statement apart, the Speaker's right both ways — South Carolinians are worse off since Mark Sanford became governor, and there's no good reason why the governor should not be over the ESC. In a properly balanced system of government, separate branches of government — legislative vs. executive, executive vs. judicial, etc. — need to have separate bases of power and different lines of accountability. Two entities within the executive branch do NOT.

But the ESC does not agree, and put out this release today:

SCESC Commission Responds to Legislative "Reform" Bill

For Immediate Release                                                                           February 4, 2009

    An economic recession, a high unemployment rate and an unprecedented number of people receiving benefits have led the Governor and several legislators to question the integrity of the S.C. Employment Security Commission.
    The problems currently affecting the system are economic, not systemic, as attested by the fact that other states with similarly high unemployment are also borrowing money to pay benefits.
    The Employment Security Commission’s main concern continues to be addressing the critical the needs of the over 100,000 unemployed citizens of our state through the administering of unemployment benefits, helping individuals to find available jobs and providing a variety of Labor Market Information to both employers, jobseekers and the general public.
    At the same time, the agency is working to provide additional jobs data that the Governor has requested. We will also work closely with the state legislature to assist them in any way possible.
    We have faith in our employees and in the integrity of our system, which has continued to provide excellent employment service to the people of this state for over seventy years.

Don't you love the touch of putting "reform" in quotation marks? In bringing this release to my attention today, a colleague said, "Yes, it's tame. But I find it rather extraordinary that an agency would put out a news release essentially attacking a bill that was introduced to restructure it. Even DHEC doesn't do THAT." If you'll recall, DHEC Commissioner Earl Hunter confined himself to an internal memo — and apparently some informal networking that persuaded allies to back away from reform (or so I infer from the pattern of events).

Here's the thing, folks: The ESC is right to say that the governor's criticism is largely off-base, and willfully ignores the reality of mounting unemployment in this state (preferring to blame it on inefficiency in the agency, because he believes gummint is to blame for everything, and can never be the solution). But the governor's right to gripe when the ESC stonewalls him on information.

The bottom line is that there shouldn't be any political space for these two sides to be fighting. The ESC ought to have to do what the governor says, and the governor shouldn't be able to shirk his responsibility to the people of this state by blaming climbing unemployment on those people over there.

That's why we need to get us some of that re-form, Daddy.

How dumb can an unfunded mandate get?

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I've never compiled an All-Time, Top Five List of Dumbest Unfunded Mandates Ever, but if I did, Robert Ford's "idea" (I'm using the word loosely, hence the quote marks) to require local gummints to take off on Confederate Memorial Day would certainly make the list. There's nothing new about it, of course — he's pushed this one before — but hey, a classic is a classic.

I find myself wondering whether Sen. Ford and Glenn McConnell are going to go back on the TV circuit with their Separate Heritages act — you know, McConnell in full Confederate dress-up; Ford in dashiki talking Black Liberation — or maybe they already have done that again in this cause, and (mercifully) I missed it.

In case you know not whereof I speak, the two Charlestonians, in a determined effort to show us all that there IS something odd in the water down there, went about in costume a few years back emphasizing that black and white South Carolinians should be encouraged in celebrating their very separate heritages — as though we have naught in common. Brilliant.

Hope springs, even in S.C. politics

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
Last week’s column chronicled my rapid descent into a state of fuming impatience over the things that we simply refuse to do in South Carolina even though they would obviously, irrefutably make us healthier, wealthier and wiser. The proximate object of my frustration was our steadfast refusal to save young people’s lives by raising our lowest-in-the-nation cigarette tax to the national average. But I could as well have fulminated about our fragmented, unaccountable governmental structure, or the crying need for comprehensive tax reform, or… well, there’s a long list.
    And if I wanted to shake my fist at our fate a bit more today, I would have no shortage of cause. I could, for instance, dwell on the discouraging hour or so I spent Wednesday listening to our governor talk about his 2009 agenda: Yes, he’ll back a cigarette tax increase — a third of the way to the average — but only if he gets the counterbalancing tax cut he wants. Otherwise, he’ll veto it, again, without compunction. And yeah, he agrees that consolidating some of our smaller and less efficient school districts would be worthwhile, but he won’t spend energy pushing for that; he prefers to waste what little capital he has in the education arena in another debilitating ideological battle over vouchers. And so forth.
    Depressing.
    But that’s not what I want to do today. Today, I want to offer hope, and I’ve got some on hand. This past week, we saw some remarkable instances in which things that just were not ever going to change in South Carolina — not no way, not nohow, as they might say in Oz — suddenly change, and for the better.
    Let’s start with the sudden emerging consensus to place the Department of Health and Environmental Control — one of our biggest and least answerable agencies — under the authority of the governor. Set aside what I just said about this particular governor. The governor — this one or any other — is the elected chief executive, and far more likely and able to see that the agency is run the way we the people want and expect it to be than a largely autonomous, unelected board is.
    This is painfully obvious to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of how politics works, and has been ever since my colleagues and I started pushing for it with all our might back in 1991. At the time, though, we had few allies other than a few wonkish good-government types and the occasional governor who wanted the power, while almost everyone else in a position to do something about it or with a stake in the system was ready and able to resist the change.
    All sorts of people had all sorts of reasons to fight reform. Environmentalists, for instance, knew how to game the complicated system and lay roadblocks to polluters and other adversaries, and feared that a more “efficient” system — especially one run by a governor enamored of economic development at any cost — would make it harder to block permits they opposed.
    And in South Carolina, the status quo always has the upper hand in the Legislature. So I despaired of seeing reform.
    Then one day, just before Christmas I think it was, I ran into Sammy Fretwell — who along with fellow veteran reporter John Monk had been writing a hard-hitting series about DHEC’s failures to do its job well — and he told me a remarkable thing: A key environmental leader who had long opposed making DHEC a Cabinet agency had become a convert to accountability.
    That was wonderful, but it was just the beginning. Other conservationists started working for, rather than against, a bipartisan bill backed by longtime restructuring stalwart Sen. John Courson and Sen. Phil Leventis in the Senate, and a similar bill in the House. The stunner, the coup de grace to my lingering doubts, came in Thursday’s paper: Bo Aughtry, chairman of the DHEC board, the man at the very center of the status quo’s sanctum sanctorum, called for making it a Cabinet agency. And several former board chairs agreed with him.
    Folks, stuff like this doesn’t happen in South Carolina. But it did, and is continuing to happen. And if it happened on this issue, it can happen on others. Such as, say, transparency.
    Remember what happened at the end of 2008 to Nikki Haley and Nathan Ballentine, two young GOP lawmakers who were innocent enough — and guileless, idealistic and dumb enough — to confront the leadership openly and directly on the need to have roll-call votes on important action? They got crushed, as one would expect. They were handed their heads. Advocates of reform were appalled, but expected nothing different.
    Then, on Wednesday, the House voted, unanimously, to do pretty much what Ms. Haley wanted. And the Senate did much the same. And all of a sudden, it was touted on all hands — by the leadership as well as by the governor and the long-suffering reformers — as just what everyone had wanted all along. And Nikki Haley, rising like a phoenix, is the heroine of the hour.
    Stuff like this doesn’t happen, not like this, not out of nowhere, not out of the mere fact that it’s the right thing to do and there are no good reasons not to do it, not in South Carolina. But it did.
    So now I’m just seeing hope everywhere. Such as in a poll released Wednesday that showed that 74 percent of S.C. voters support raising our cigarette tax to the national average. Sixty percent favor it strongly.
    Here’s the thing about that: As I indicated in last week’s column, the arguments for going all the way to the national average are so strong, and the arguments not to do so are so weak, that only the most perverse sort of resistance to rational change can prevent it from happening.
    In the past, such perversity has been richly abundant in South Carolina. But last week, we seemed to suffer a sudden shortage of it on two surprising fronts.
    So take hope.

For more to be hopeful about, please go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

S.C. Policy Council pleased, too

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Nikki Haley isn't the only previous critic pleased by the House action today. The S.C. Policy Council, her ally on the roll-call voting issue since last session, has also praised the latest move:

For Immediate Release

Contact: Bryan Cox

January 14, 2009

HOUSE EMBRACES TRANSPARENCY, REQUIRES VOTING ON THE RECORD

    The South Carolina House unanimously voted to amend its rules today to require recorded votes on a wide variety of legislation including each section of the state budget, conference committee reports and amended legislature returned from the Senate. The comprehensive rules change passed by the House is even more stringent than the rules approved yesterday by the Senate, which did not include each section of the state budget.
     Policy Council President Ashley Landess said the new House rules show the General Assembly understands the importance of transparency in government.

     “Today’s action is exactly the type of accountability measures the citizens of South Carolina have demanded for the past six months. This is a clear example of what can happen when citizens get involved in the democratic process,” said Landess.
     “Reformers in the House, particularly Representative Nikki Haley, deserve credit for fighting political pressure and standing up for the taxpayers. Today the public won a major victory and we are especially pleased to see transparency brought to the state budget process. The House deserves credit for fixing what was broken and taking a major step toward real reform. This is just the beginning of a movement toward fully transparent and accountable government and we look forward to continue working with reform-minded lawmakers to bring about much-needed change to our state.” …

###

So let's see — Nikki's happy. The Speaker's happy. The Policy Council is happy. I guess I'm happy, too, although I haven't really studied what happened yet — I'm just passing it on to you as fast as it comes in…

Nikki Haley applauds House action on roll-call voting

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OK, well, this message, received moments ago, through me for a bit of a loop:

The Haley E-Newsletter – On The Record Voting passes the House

Dear Friends,

We Did It!  On-the-Record Voting just passed on the floor of the South Carolina
House of Representatives by a vote of 115-0!
 
Click here to read my blog which has more details as well as my thoughts about this significant
accomplishment.

Are you as surprised as I am? I had no idea that Nikki had a blog.

There's also, of course, the fact that I thought what the House had been planning to do on roll-call voting did not meet Nikki's, or Nathan Ballantine's standards, which is what all that fuss was about that led to the Speaker booting them off their committees, etc.

But Cindi tells me that the House moved in Nikki's and Nathan's direction on this today. So all's well, I suppose. I haven't had time to sort it out yet; I just bring it to your attention.

Meanwhile, here's what the Speaker's office put out on the subject today:

Office of the Speaker

SOUTH CAROLINA HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                                   

January 14, 2009                                                                                                       

Contact: Greg Foster    

House Strengthens Requirements for Roll Call Votes
Adds to list of required transparent votes

(Columbia, SC) – During December’s organizational session, the House adopted a rule strengthening the requirements in which roll call votes are taken.  Today, House members added to this accountability requirement more instances in which an automatic roll call vote will be required.
     House Speaker Bobby Harrell said, “Strengthening our transparency rules in December was the right thing to do.  Since then, a number of members said they would like to see a few more items added to the required roll call list.  This measure – unanimously adopted by the House – provides for even more true accountability on the major issues taken up by the House of Representatives.”
     Measures requiring a roll call include:

  • Amendment to the Constitution of South Carolina
  • Legislation ratifying a proposed amendment to Constitution of South Carolina
  • Bills raising or reducing a tax or fee
  • Adoption of the Budget
  •  ***Adoption of each section of the Budget unless unanimous consent is given
  • Adoption of a state or congressional reapportionment plan
  • Bills increasing or decreasing the salary, benefits, or retirement benefits of members of the General Assembly, Constitutional Officers, or members of the Judicial Branch
  • Bills amending the Ethics and Accountability Act or the Campaign Finance Act;
  • ***Conference and free conference report
  • Any question for which the Constitution of South Carolina requires a roll call vote
  • Amendments to the Budget spending $10,000 or more
  • ***Adoption of bills returned to the House with Senate Amendments
  • Any election by the General Assembly or the House or Representatives except where the election is declared by unanimous consent to be by declaration
  • All vetoes from the Governor
  • Any questions for which 10 members of the House request a roll call vote

*** New requirements added to December’s rule Change
                  # # #