SC Senate’s bill-killing rules could be changed

The days of a single S.C. state senator using the Senate’s rules to gum up the legislative works could be coming to an end.

Senate President Pro Tempore Hugh Leatherman, R-Florence, has asked seven senators to review the Senate’s rules and determine if any “changes could be made to improve the efficiency and productivity of the Senate.”

Leatherman wants the group’s recommendations by mid-October, in time to consider changes before the Legislature returns to Columbia in January.

New Senate rules are adopted every four years, coinciding with senators’ four-year terms. The new focus on rules comes after the Senate failed to act on several proposals until the last minute in recent years – ranging from ethics reform to paying to repair the state’s roads – because some senators used the body’s rules to delay or block legislation.

For example, a senator will add hundreds of amendments to a proposal, and force a time-consuming debate and vote on each, in effect filibustering the bill. A single senator also can object to legislation, a move that sometimes holds up a proposal indefinitely.

Leatherman said senators have abused the system, citing the practice of adding amendments to stonewall proposals. “That’s wrong,” said the Florence Republican.

But changing the rules is a sensitive issue.

Unlike the overwhelmingly Republican S.C. House, which can speed through proposals if they are part of the GOP agenda, the politically divided Senate’s famously slow, deliberative pace and arcane rules ensure that minority opinions are heard, senators say.

However, reforming the rules to ensure that no single senator can kill a proposal is long overdue, said one good-government watchdog.

Far from being as bad as Congress?

When Leatherman took over as Senate leader, he said the body’s once-famous courtesy and decorum had diminished in recent years. “I want to restore that,” he said.

While Leatherman wants the seven senators’ rule-change proposal by mid-October, he said goal is not to make “the Senate ... a legislative race track.”

The Senate will continue to deliberate on issues that come before it, he added.

Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, R-Edgefield, defended that deliberate pace, saying it should be difficult to change state law.

The Senate’s rules are designed to ensure it will move slowly and the minority on an issue is not run over, Massey said.

But, he added, there are very real public concerns that the Senate has trouble getting work done at times. That frustration is even greater for some in the Senate, he said.

“The rules certainly contribute to some of the tension and deadlocks that we have in the body,” said Massey, one of the seven senators named to study rules changes.

Senate rules are designed to protect the minority viewpoint on an issue, said Senate Minority Leader Nikki Setzler, D-Lexington, adding that the minority view is not always the minority party.

At times, various Senate factions – Democrats, African-Americans, women, alliances of Democrats and moderate Republicans, and the GOP’s tea party-leaning William Wallace Caucus – have used the rules to ensure their opinions are heard or legislation is killed.

Democrat Setzler, also a member of the rules study panel, says the rules have worked effectively during his 39 years in the Senate, including years as a member of the majority party that controlled the body and, since 2001, the Senate’s minority party.

He also challenged the idea that the Senate is dysfunctional, pointing to proposals that passed at the end of June’s legislative session – a borrowing plan to pay for some road repairs that passed after years of debate, a proposal to give farmers $40 million in flood aid and two proposals to tighten the state’s ethics laws, part of a larger proposal that had been stalled in the Senate for years.

“The South Carolina Senate is far from being the United States Congress and what’s happened up there,” Setzler said.

Reform ‘long overdue,’ watchdog says

But longtime government watchdog John Crangle says the Senate has a problem.

When senators object to bills, “they basically sandbag the legislative process,” said Crangle, head of the good-government group Common Cause S.C.

Senators should rein in the ability of a single senator to delay or even stop bills from being considered, Crangle said. “That’s long overdue.”

The ability to stall legislation for a short period of time – but not block it altogether – can have merit, Crangle said.

“(But) I don’t think (how) the filibuster works now is helping us solve the problems we need solved in South Carolina,” he said.

This story was originally published August 14, 2016 at 6:19 PM with the headline "SC Senate’s bill-killing rules could be changed."