Scoppe: As clock ticks down, lawmakers sweat the small stuff

IT’S CRUNCH time at the State House. Just three days to go before the Legislature adjourns for the year, and all those bills that don’t make it through both bodies will be held in purgatory until January. So how are legislators spending those precious final few hours?

Well, they’re leaving time to take up the governor’s budget vetoes. But meanwhile, once senators either pass a pathetic compromise or give up for the year on regulating the payday lending industry, they’ll resume their debate on a concurrent resolution memorializing the Congress on state matters.

Actually, that makes it sound more meaningful than it is. You might think the resolution is another attempt to make sure our state can collect the $700 million in federal stimulus funds that the governor wants to take only if lawmakers promise to use it to not stimulate the economy. Just the opposite: It’s a resolution “to affirm South Carolina’s sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution” — essentially a letter to the Congress, telling it to butt its big fat nose out of our business.

Senators have been arguing about this, or arguing about whether to argue about it, off and on for a month now, and they might very well be arguing about it when the clock strikes 5 on Thursday, ending the session. And here’s the kicker: Not only is it a ridiculous waste of time — as are all of these congressional resolutions, no matter what the subject matter — but it’s a Senate bill, which means that even if the Senate approves it, there’s a good chance the House won’t take it up until January.

If you’re getting a sense of deju vu, it’s because this is pretty much where the Senate finds itself at the end of every legislative session — tied in knots over completely irrelevant or at best insignificant legislation and unable to get on to more substantive matters that it actually needs to be debating.

Like that moratorium on new mega-dumps that we were assured would be approved to keep out-of-state operators from burying even more of the East Coast’s garbage in our state. The Senate passed it, but then last week two House members blocked it, and with the House off on furlough for much of the session, representatives had the convenient excuse of the ticking clock to keep them from reviving it.

Nor will the Legislature spend these final days working to reform the Department of Health and Environmental Control (another thing we were assured they would do this year), whose inept handling of landfill laws invited the mega-dumps into our state. Or any of the other agencies that desperately need reform.

Our unemployment rate remains the third-worst in the nation, but the Legislature won’t be talking about any way to address that other than spending federal stimulus funds to keep from firing more state employees — which shouldn’t even need to be talked about, since every other state in the nation did that without having to debate it, but ... well, those other states don’t have the peculiar problem we do.

And barring an unexpected breakthrough, lawmakers won’t even spend any time debating the cigarette tax hike that more than 70 percent of South Carolinians want the Legislature to pass. The one that 97 of the 124 House members voted for. The one that nearly every member of the Senate says he favors. The one that will save several hundred children every year from starting to smoke, by pricing cigarettes out of their reach until they’re old enough to know better.

You see, there’s a disagreement over how to spend the money, and apparently no time to resolve that disagreement. There might be no will to do so either, but if things worked differently in the upper chamber, senators might at least be forced to try, which is the first and most essential precondition to success.

This is what happens when individuals are allowed to set the agenda — as Senate rules still allow, though to a lesser degree than they once did — and the majority doesn’t have the backbone to say “no” when somebody wants to debate these placate-the-nutball-voters and/or special-interest bills.

Across the hall, representatives are scheduled to take up a measure to replace aging billboards with more of those flashy, driver-distracting digital numbers, and a bill to authorize “Our Farms — Our Futures” license plates. Hardly earth-shattering stuff.

The difference is that if debate drags on for more than 10 or 20 minutes on those or any of the other less-than-momentous items on the House calendar, representatives will move on. Even if they decide to tackle some of the more substantive items on the calendar, a bare majority can shut down debate and force a vote within a couple of hours — something House members are all too willing to do. By contrast, it takes 26 of 46 votes to shut down Senate debate, and senators are loathe to do it, even if it means they win.

Perhaps senators will prove me wrong. Perhaps they’ll just skip over their silly little letter to the Congress and focus on some work that needs to be done. And perhaps, as one comedian put it last week, swine flu really will produce pigs that fly.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.