TheState.com: Cindi Scoppe

Scoppe: A kinder, gentler governor?

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:48 EDT

LET’S STIPULATE at the outset that politicians talk differently to editorial writers than they talk to other politicians, and to the public. They’re more measured, less apt to throw out red meat, more … reasonable. Even so, it was striking last week to notice how gingerly Gov. Nikki Haley spoke about the Legislature when she talked with editorial writers about her post-spring-break priorities.

Oh, she left little doubt that she was worried — as am I, as are others who want to see some progress — about the prognosis for ethics reform and government restructuring efforts, both of which looked fairly promising coming into this legislative session.

She said repeatedly that important legislation was being “slow walked,” and she called out the lower chamber for failing to act on either measure, noting that “The House really hasn’t done that much this year, and we want to get them focused again.”

But there were no attacks. No zingers. Time after time, she kept coming back to how the changes she’s pushing would benefit legislators. It was as if she was actually trying to make a convincing argument — in recent years a foreign concept for governors — rather than simply hammering them over the head with pre-gurgitated talking points. It’s not the first time I’ve seen this — she took a similar tack the first time she broke her fast from editorial writer discourse, back in the fall — but it’s so different from her initial, pugilistic approach to the Legislature that it’s still worth noting.

The governor framed fuller income-disclosure requirements for lawmakers not as preventing them from hiding conflicts of interest but as making their decisions easier: “As a legislator, I would have loved knowing exactly what I had to do rather than having to go to a staff attorney and say what do I do,” said the governor who, quite legally, left some extremely interesting conflicts off of her own disclosure reports. She spoke similarly about the idea of making how campaign funds can be spent “very black and white.”

Scoppe: Guns in bars, and other silly ideas

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 17:15 EDT

THE U.S. Constitution guarantees us freedom of religion. But that doesn’t mean that parents can withhold critical medical care from their children because their religion tells them to. It doesn’t mean that men can beat their wives — or have two wives. It doesn’t mean that communities can sacrifice virgins to their gods or impose sharia law on their members.

In all of these cases and countless others — including, yes, freedom of speech and freedom of the press — we understand that an individual’s constitutional right sometimes must give way to the safety and well-being of others.

Modest, reasonable restrictions on guns are no different, as our nation has always recognized.

South Carolina is not hostile to guns. South Carolina is not even neutral toward guns. South Carolina is pro-gun. We encourage people to buy — and use — guns, by giving them an annual tax holiday on guns and ammunition.

Buy a knife, and you pay taxes on it. Buy a book on building bear traps, and you pay taxes. Buy a gun, at least during our statutorily designated “Second Amendment Weekend,” and you pay no taxes. What that means is that those who do not buy guns and ammunition effectively subsidize your purchase.

Scoppe: It’s not about Haley

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 17:45 EDT

THE REFRAIN is fairly constant, and by now all too predictable: I don’t want Nikki Haley to have any more power. I don’t trust her to appoint the superintendent of education. Or the adjutant general. Or to control state procurement decisions.

It’s just like it was with Mark Sanford, only more so, because Mr. Sanford didn’t lose our Social Security and bank account numbers, and there was never any real threat that the Legislature would actually give him any more power.

Nowadays, any time Gov. Haley or the Legislature or I or anyone else starts talking about giving the governor the tools that governors in 49 other states take for granted, too many Democrat legislators start complaining, and my inbox fills up with emails about how partisan or ideological or incompetent or untrustworthy she is. As if that’s the basis on which we should decide how our government will operate after she’s long gone.

To be fair, I have no doubt that a lot of Republicans who now support these changes would have been adamantly opposed had they been proposed during the administration of Jim Hodges, our last Democratic governor.

But they weren’t, and so here we are, with a lot of Republicans supporting smart structural reforms for all the wrong reasons, and a lot of Democrats opposing them for all the wrong reasons, chief of which is the “I don’t want Nikki Haley …” argument.

Scoppe: Who wants accountability? Certainly not legislators

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 17:15 EDT

SOME JOBS are so politically sensitive that their occupants need special protections that run contrary to the general rule that top government officials ought to be accountable to someone — usually the governor — for their actions.

Members of the State Ethics Commission, for instance, are charged with deciding whether the governor and her supporters broke the ethics law, so she can’t remove them unless they break the law or refuse to show up for work, or meet a few other narrow criteria.

We give the same protection to the SLED chief for similar reasons, and to the inspector general, who is charged with ferreting out wrongdoing in state agencies, including the governor’s Cabinet and even her office.

But we don’t stop there. The list of protected gubernatorial appointees — that is, people who are hired or appointed by the governor but who, in reality, don’t work for her, or for anyone else, because they can’t be fired — is up to 15 categories, one of which (members of professional licensing boards) encompasses hundreds of people. And it’s growing.

Now senators want to add a new cybersecurity chief to the list of protected employees, making it impossible to fire him without going through a drawn-out administrative and possibly judicial procedure, to prove to exacting legal standards that he’s not up to the job.

Scoppe: The wrong message to send business prospects

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 23:44 EDT

IF YOU’VE been paying attention to Gov. Nikki Haley’s pro-public health, anti-Obamacare campaign, you might recognize the talking points:

“America is one of the least healthy industrialized nations, and South Carolina is one of America’s least healthy states.”

To be more economically competitive, we need a healthier workforce, which requires “improving health status, improving health-care delivery and lowering the per capita cost of care.”

We improve health status by tackling our state’s bottom-dragging indicators: diabetes (49th worst in the nation), low birth weight (47th), lack of health insurance (45th), obesity (42nd), infant mortality (40th) and smoking (39th).

Those numbers derive largely from “social determinants,” so improving health starts with changing people’s behavior — which we won’t do as long as “all of us get our health care because of our status, not our behavior.”

Scoppe: How SC taxes balance out each other

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 00:05 EDT

WHEN THE liberal Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy released its latest “Distributional Analysis of the Tax Systems in All 50 States” earlier this year, Republican tax guru Burnie Maybank sent out a blast email proclaiming that “SC fares well on new Tax Equity Study.”

The Revenue director for Govs. Mark Sanford and David Beasley noted that our tax system “was largely proportionate but was generally more progressive than the national average.”

Meantime, Democratic tax policy analyst John Ruoff posted a report on his blog pointing out that “Low-income and middle class taxpayers in South Carolina pay a larger share of their income to support our public structures and systems than do our wealthiest taxpayers.”

Unfortunately, the report didn’t really tell us either, at least not for certain.

Both Mr. Maybank and Mr. Ruoff accurately reported different aspects of the study: Our taxes are slightly regressive — that is, the lower your income, the larger the percentage of that income you pay in taxes — but they’re far less regressive than in the other states.

Scoppe: Don’t be distracted by constitutional claims on ethics

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:57 EDT

IF A REAL ESTATE agent who happens to be a legislator violates the law governing real estate agents, the Real Estate Commission, which is part of the Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation, can fine him or suspend him or revoke his license, just like it would do to any other real estate agent.

If a lawyer who happens to be a legislator steals money from her clients, the Supreme Court can reprimand or disbar her, just like it would any other lawyer.

If a legislator robs a liquor store or shoots his wife, the city police or sheriff’s department can arrest him and the solicitor can prosecute him, just like they would any other criminal.

So why in the world would we need to change the state constitution in order to let an independent state ethics commission, instead of internal legislative ethics committees, enforce legislators’ compliance with the state ethics law?

Well, the argument goes this way: The constitution gives the House and Senate sole authority to “choose its own officers, determine its rules of procedure, punish its members for disorderly conduct.” It also says no member of the executive, legislative or judicial branch of government may “assume or discharge the duties of any other.” Therefore, this argument continues, no member of the executive or judicial branch may enforce legislators’ compliance with the ethics law.

Scoppe: Adjutant general leading charge for reform

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 18:23 EDT

SOUTH Carolina’s antebellum system of selecting our military leadership worked well for Bob Livingston. He rose steadily through the ranks to major general, led an 1,800-strong combat brigade in a yearlong deployment to Afghanistan in 2007, held key leadership posts with Central Command and at the Pentagon, and when he decided in 2010 that he wanted to be adjutant general, well, he became adjutant general. Without a fight.

I’m told there was a lot of behind-the-scenes work, that then-Adjutant General Stan Spears had planned to run again, and that may be true, but the fact is that when Gen. Livingston filed for the only publicly elected military post in the free world, no one filed to run against him. Not another Republican. Not a Democrat. No one. So the job is his, and likely will be for as long as he wants it.

Not exactly the type of person you’d vote “Most Likely to Dismantle the South Carolina’s Military Anachronism.” Which, when you think about it, is one of the reasons he was elected. And yet, he is well on his way to doing just that. As early as today, the House could take up legislation to ask voters in a constitutional referendum to let future governors appoint the adjutant general from among colonels and generals with at least 10 years experience in the Guard, among other criteria.

Gen. Livingston, who spends a day a week selling the idea to legislators and the public, told me last week that the nation’s increasing reliance on the National Guard has made it imperative that the adjutant general is up to the job — which you simply can’t ensure through a public election.

“We’ve had great adjutants in the past,” he said. “But the level of play for the National Guard nationally has just elevated to such a level that we cannot afford to make a mistake, and we cannot afford to have politics within the Guard, and that’s just something that the current system does allow to happen. Even if it’s remote, it does allow it to happen. So it’s how the National Guard has evolved and occupied that centerpiece in our nation’s defense over the last twelve years that’s really driving this whole issue.”

Scoppe: Wanted: 3 Senate votes for accountable government

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 17:26 EDT

THE IDEA of making the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government equally powerful, and thus able to serve as checks on each others’ excesses, is foundational to our nation’s government, embraced for two centuries by Republicans and Democrats alike.

Of course, South Carolina barely even paid lip service to the idea of checks and balances, instead vesting all power in the Legislature and dividing executive power among nine separately elected statewide officials and scores of independent boards and commissions — and you see where that got us — until the 1990s. That’s when then-House Speaker Bob Sheheen, Judiciary Chairman Jim Hodges and Ways and Means Chairman Billy Boan decided to champion then-Gov. Carroll Campbell’s call to let governors control part of the executive branch. Mr. Campbell’s excellent idea would have been still-born if not for the work of those legislators, all Democrats, one of them our last Democratic governor.

Today the idea of finishing the job begun by Mr. Sheheen et al has no more articulate standard-bearer than his nephew, Sen. Vincent Sheheen, the Democrats’ 2010 and likely 2014 candidate for governor.

But if you spend much time watching the Legislature, you’d think the idea of empowering governors with nearly as much power as our Legislature was part of a Republican plot to steal whatever shards of power S.C. Democrats still possess.

How else to explain the Senate’s near party-line defeat on Wednesday of legislation to allow future governors to appoint the person who oversees 40 percent of our state’s general tax funds, the superintendent of education?

Scoppe: The moral argument for Medicaid expansion

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 16:02 EDT

OUTSIDE the brief, and fruitless, effort this past week by House Democrats, the debate over expanding Medicaid to cover more of the working poor has been waged largely on economic terms, and understandably so: This decision has profound economic consequences — both in terms of the cost to state government of doing it and the much larger cost to all of us of not doing it.

But for many people, this is first and foremost a moral question, a question of our obligation to the least of these. It is in that context that the leader of the state’s 200,000 Roman Catholics, the Most Rev. Robert E. Guglielmone, has engaged this ongoing political battle, framing the question in terms that any Christian would have to see as profoundly powerful.

In his Lenten pastoral message, the bishop leaves no question about what he considers the state’s moral obligation to provide medical care to 350,000 poor South Carolinians who aren’t covered and can’t afford health insurance.

“The State of South Carolina would be required to pay for ten percent of the total cost of this expansion after three years of full funding by the Federal Government,” he writes. “This will require us as a state to find the revenue to pay for this expansion. It will cost us.

“Bearing a cost for the sake of something greater is the heart of our faith; it brought us salvation.”

Scoppe: Taking a gamble on charitable gambling

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 16:06 EST

EVEN LONGTIME gambling opponents, we are told, have softened their position on charity raffles.

Well, that’s one way to look at the Senate’s 38-1 vote to amend the state constitution and allow another exception to the state’s ban on lotteries. (The state already exempted itself, a foolish move that isn’t going to be reversed anytime soon.)

The other way to look at it is to recognize that longtime gambling promoters finally stopped being kid-in-a-candy-store greedy, and started proposing legislation that was nearly as modest as they claim.

Like a lot of longtime gambling opponents, I’ve never had any great objection to allowing a parish to hold a raffle in the fellowship hall after Mass to raise money for the building fund. Never minded the idea of letting the PTA sell $1 tickets for a cake walk to come up with some cash for an after-school program.

But no one actually proposed that before.

Scoppe: How taxes go down while spending goes up

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 17:30 EST

FOR MANY, it’s an article of faith: Taxes in our state are going up, and government is growing.

And little wonder, with elected officials from the governor on down constantly harping about how crucial it is to slash taxes and how awful it is for the Legislature to keep “growing government” — something we’re likely to hear another round of as the House prepares to debate next year’s state budget and the politicians, or at least the Republican politicians, try to convince the tea party faction that they’re pure enough to trust.

Tell people that our taxes have actually been on a steady decline for decades, and they simply won’t believe you, no matter how much evidence you present. Ditto trying to explain that by some measures we’re still spending less on state government than we did before the recession.

I used to think the problem was that everybody these days thinks they’re entitled to their own set of facts. It was only recently that I realized there’s a deeper problem: The actual facts just don’t make any sense to many people’s way of thinking, so they treat the disconnect as cognitive dissonance and throw out the data that don’t comport with their reality.

Consider this analysis from an Upstate anti-government activist, speaking recently to The Greenville News: “Every year our state budget continues to go up, up, up, far exceeding our growth. So we’re getting more government, we’re getting higher taxes.

Scoppe: Tackling root causes of our bad health

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 15:10 EST

I ALWAYS thought the huge flaw of Obamacare was that it didn’t do nearly enough to encourage prevention, which is the only way to improve our health while reducing our medical costs. Little did I realize the perverse power of anti-Obamaism.

It turns out that Obamacare already is making South Carolina healthier. Or at least it’s about to, if all the Republican initiatives to counter it take hold.

From paying hospitals to set up emergency-room alternatives to focusing on obesity in the communities where it’s taking the greatest toll, GOP politicians suddenly have become our state’s most aggressive public-health advocates.

And after years of doing absolutely nothing proactive to improve the public health — it took decades just to raise the lowest-in-the-nation cigarette tax, despite reams of studies demonstrating that slashes teen smoking — they’re putting forth smart proposals. Proposals they never would have dreamed of if they hadn’t been trying to find ways to justify turning down the most generous match the federal government has ever offered to expand Medicaid eligibility.

The budget that the House will take up in a week includes two fine public-health initiatives that support efforts by Gov. Nikki Haley’s pro-public-health, anti-Obamacare Medicaid Director Tony Keck and our new obesity-fighting DHEC Director Catherine Templeton.

Scoppe: Chronic problems

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:19 EST

Following is a three-part series Cindi Ross Scoppe wrote in 2007 exploring the role chronic medical conditions play in our health and our health-care policies.

Part 1: Obesity, smoking the root of chronic health crisis

Part 2: Prevention key for individuals, society

Part 3: Replacing sick care with health care

The big seven chronic diseases share a common thread, or two

Scoppe: Car sales tax needs a change, but not this one

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 17:36 EST

CRITICS complain that House Republicans’ plan to divert automobile sales tax revenues to road repairs will steal money from schools and other crucial state services that already are struggling to keep up with a growing population and the Legislature’s annual fit of new tax cuts. And that is incontrovertibly true.

But while there’s room to debate whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing — and I think it’s a bad thing — there’s a much larger problem with the tax-diversion plan. That problem was underscored by the way Republicans rolled out their proposal last month: as part of a “comprehensive tax reform.”

Now, there’s no question that we need a comprehensive reform of our taxes. Some taxes are too high, some are too low, and many — the sales tax chief among them — are so full of loopholes that the holes are literally larger than the sum of the parts. We desperately need to cull the exemptions, cut the taxes that are too high, raise the taxes that are too low and change the way we calculate lots of them, so we end up with a tax system that generates the revenue we need to provide necessary state services without unfairly burdening any classifications of taxpayers or unduly hindering our economic growth.

Unfortunately, what House Republicans have proposed is not comprehensive tax reform. Their package is composed of five bills: three to cut taxes; one to eliminate a few small sales tax exemptions and lower the tax rate in order to keep those changes revenue neutral (that, by the way, is actual reform; it’s just too pathetically small to make much difference); and the automobile-tax shift.

Even if this were really a tax- reform package, the bill dealing with the sales tax on cars, boats, planes and other motor vehicles would be a sore thumb, because it doesn’t have to anything to do with taxation. It’s a plan to change the way those taxes are spent once they’re collected, an entirely different thing.

Scoppe: Lesson from DEW shakeup not what you think

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 08:53 EST

WHEN THINGS started unraveling at the Department of Employment and Workforce, they did so with dizzying speed.

It started two weeks ago, when Democrats accused Gov. Nikki Haley of declaring war on rural South Carolina after her agency announced a cost-cutting move to stop providing in-person help for people filing unemployment claims in 14 rural counties.

Then the latest report came out from the federal government, estimating that the agency made $54 million in improper payments last year and had the eighth-worst fraud rate in the nation. That provoked the ire of some Republicans who already were outraged that the agency hadn’t immediately stopped paying every claim they considered questionable after the Legislature tightened the rules last year.

The agency was still trying to explain what a big improvement the numbers represented from the previous year and how aggressively it is pursuing fraud charges — while fighting back suggestions, by a would-be vendor trying to sell its fraud-detection package, that the errors were easily detectable — when Democrats fired the next salvo, during a committee meeting Thursday: The agency had given raises totaling $437,000 to 69 employees at the same time it was deciding to lay off 55 unemployment division workers.

Agency officials raised bipartisan ire by refusing to comment on the charge, absurdly claiming it would violate employees’ privacy. More senators piled on with questions about employee training sessions held at the beach. And within a day, Director Abraham Turner had tendered a hand-written resignation to the governor.

Scoppe: Sunlight — the other part of ethics

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 17:07 EST

IT’S A TESTAMENT to how little S.C. officials think of the concept of operating government in public that many media interests have been wary of a proposal to close the biggest loophole in the Freedom of Information Act.

It’s not that they want to retain the loophole that exempts an entire branch of the government. Rather, they worry that trying to close it would derail efforts to pass a bill that aims to make the people already covered by the law actually obey it.

The legislation that the S.C. Press Association is pushing is by any standard a modest bill, which addresses what can only be called willful actions to keep public information out of the public’s hands. It was written in response to years of public officials dragging their heels for weeks, months, years on providing public documents; charging hundreds or thousands of dollars to “research” (by which they often mean “find a way to hide”) records and copy documents; and simply refusing to comply with the law, forcing people who seek information to hire an attorney and take them to court.

The problem was underscored by the 2012 study that ranked South Carolina as the nation’s sixth-most corruptible state, helping to propel ethics reform to the front of this year’s legislative agenda. The Center for Public Integrity found that our government is at its worst when it comes to providing public information to the public, because while the public-access requirements in our law look pretty good on paper, there’s no enforcement provisions and far too little compliance.

Although we traditionally have thought of government ethics and open government as separate issues, they are in fact inextricably linked. Secrecy, whether about how elected officials make their money or how they spend our money, creates a fertile breeding ground for corruption. And letting the public know about governmental actions reduces the chance that public officials will act in their own interest instead of the public’s interest in the very same way as letting the public know about lawmakers’ potential conflicts of interest.

Scoppe: A roadmap to ethics reform

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 15:15 EST

GOV. MARK Sanford is fined for misusing state resources and campaign funds. Lt. Gov. Ken Ard is convicted for misreporting and misusing campaign funds. Sens. Jake Knotts and Kent Williams are reprimanded for accepting and concealing illegal campaign donations. Gov. Nikki Haley is cleared of illegally logrolling her position as a House member. House Speaker Bobby Harrell comes under SLED investigation for allegedly using his position to help his business and putting campaign funds to personal use.

Shadowy organizations pour money into campaigns against incumbents, without giving any clue as to who they are, where their money comes from or how much they’re spending.

A landmark national study says South Carolina is more susceptible to political corruption than all but five other states.

And simmering public discontent comes to a head when a poorly thought-out and badly interpreted law results in 250 challengers being kicked off of last year’s election ballots. This isn’t really an ethics matter, but because it involves a reporting requirement in the ethics law, it combines with three years of incessant political scandals to drive ethics reform to the top of legislators’ 2013 to-do list.

Special House and Senate panels have proposed significant changes, and last month Gov. Haley’s Ethics Reform Commission unveiled an impressive package of proposals that would address nearly all of the problems. Over the coming weeks, the Legislature will sort through those proposals, with a goal of restoring public trust in our government.

Danger zone

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 16:37 EST

The most intensive push to reform South Carolina’s ethics law in two decades is being driven by a string of ethics scandals over the past three years, many at the highest levels of state government:

Lt. Gov. Ken Ard created a bizarre scheme to funnel his own money into his campaign account through third parties in an effort to convince people that he had more support than he did. After he was elected in 2010, he spent campaign donations on clothes, computer games and a family vacation. He negotiated an agreement with the State Ethics Commission and later resigned and pleaded guilty to criminal charges for misreporting and misusing campaign funds.

Gov. Mark Sanford repeatedly used state aircraft as his personal taxi and campaign funds to cover personal expenses. He was fined $140,000 and publicly reprimanded in a negotiated agreement with the State Ethics Commission. No criminal charges or impeachment charges were brought against him, and he left office at the end of his second term in 2011.

The last time the Legislature reformed the ethics law

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 15:10 EST

The following columns and editorial were published on Sunday, July 18, 2010, the 20th anniversary of Operation Lost Trust

OPERATION LOST TRUST — 20 YEARS LATER

Twenty years ago today, federal agents arrived at the offices of 17 state legislators with subpoenas and questions about the wads of crisp $100 bills they had accepted from a shady lobbyist hawking horse gambling.

Over the next 17 months, prosecutors would roll out grainy black-and-white videos that showed legislators selling their votes; a tenth of the members of the General Assembly would be convicted on corruption and drug charges, along with another 10 lobbyists and top government officials; the Legislature would pass one of the toughest ethics laws in the nation; and Gov. Carroll Campbell would use the scandal as a launching pad for his campaign to restructure the government. The massive corruption sting dubbed Operation Lost Trust would change our state forever.

Or so it seemed at the time.

Learn more about ethics reform proposals

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 15:17 EST

• To read the report from Gov. Nikki Haley’s Ethics Reform Commission, chaired by former attorneys general Henry McMaster and Travis Medlock, go to http://governor.sc.gov/Documents/SC%20Commission%20on%20Ethics%20Reform%20Final%20Report.pdf

• A brief overview of that report, provided by the governor’s office, is available at http://governor.sc.gov/Documents/Background%20on%20the%20South%20Carolina%20Commission%20on%20Ethics%20Reform.pdf

• Several bills have been introduced in the Legislature to reform our state’s ethics laws. Among those most likely to see action are three bills proposed by former House and Senate Ethics Chairman Wes Hayes and other Senate leaders, and one from Speaker Bobby Harrell and other House leaders. You can read them at

http://www.scstatehouse.gov/sess120_2013-2014/bills/338.htm

http://www.scstatehouse.gov/sess120_2013-2014/bills/346.htm

Scoppe: Wilson seeking proper balance on attorney pay

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 17:07 EST

WHEN TRINITY Cathedral in Columbia agreed last month to pay the wife of former Dean Philip Linder $75,000 to drop claims of defamation and emotional distress, church leaders were quick to say they opposed the decision. They had no choice, they said, because their insurance company had determined it would cost more to defend the church and the diocese in court than to settle the case.

It was just the latest high-profile telling of a too-oft-repeated tale that tort-reform proposals never manage to address in a smart way.

But it takes two sides to settle any lawsuit, and we don’t often think of the flip side: Sometimes people who file lawsuits agree to settle for less than they could win in court, because it would cost them more to make that case than the extra money they would receive for doing so.

And sometimes their lawyers make that same determination.

That’s one of the problems Attorney General Alan Wilson is trying to address as he rolls out an updated version of the state’s special-counsel agreement, which also asks more of outside attorneys who file lawsuits on behalf of the state.

Scoppe: Medicaid: the clash of public health, economic reality

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 17:21 EST

TONY KECK makes a good point when he says the medical system in our state and nation is “producing way too much cost and way too little outcome.”

He points, for example, to a study that found that 85 percent of the people in the United States whose blood pressure is out of control have health insurance and a regular physician. Although the insured fare better than the uninsured — 50 percent of hypertension patients with insurance have their blood pressure under control, compared to just 30 percent of those without insurance — neither number is impressive. Or healthy.

“Our goal should be to get people healthy, and to get adequate care to people,” he said during a recent visit with our editorial board. “Insurance and Medicaid aren’t necessarily the best way to get people to the care they need.”

Mr. Keck runs South Carolina’s Medicaid program, which means he runs the largest health-insurance program in our state, with 1 million enrollees. That number is projected to rise by 160,000 as people who are already eligible sign up because of the insurance mandate of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. It could go up by another 350,000 if the state expands the program to cover single adults up to 138 percent of poverty. Which Mr. Keck is at the forefront of opposing.

Although it feels a lot like Gov. Nikki Haley and others oppose expanding Medicaid simply because it’s President Obama’s idea and because South Carolina would have to pick up part of the cost, which could possibly require higher taxes, Mr. Keck builds his case around the “insurance-doesn’t-equal-health” argument.

Scoppe: Reigning in senators’ ‘desires’

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 16:08 EST

BACK WHEN transportation was unreliable and roads often nonexistent, S.C. senators developed a tradition of informing the Senate clerk of any bills on the calendar about which they were particularly interested. That way, if the creek rose or the good lord for some other reason wasn’t willing to help them to make it to Columbia on the next legislative day, their colleagues would pass over those bills, delaying the debate until they could arrive.

It was a gentlemanly way to handle such matters. And all very 19th century. Or 18th.

Over time, horses gave way to cars, and dirt trails were replaced with gravel roads and then highways, which made travel not only predictable but quick. But the tradition continued.

Now, courtesy isn’t usually a bad thing, and senators have maintained a lot of other traditions that have outgrown their usefulness. They still refer to each other in debate not by name but by county, for instance: the senator from Richland, even though there are — and have been for decades — four senators from Richland instead of just one.

But the power of a senator’s “desire to be present” has not just outlived its purpose. It has morphed from a common courtesy into the most powerful negative power in the Legislature: the single-senator blockade. A way for those who are unable to convince the majority of the rightness of their cause to kill legislation by keeping it from being debated.

Scoppe: How hacking bolsters case for empowering SC governors

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 17:24 EST

IT SEEMS counter-intuitive to give the governor more control over computer security and other administrative duties after her Department of Revenue gave away our Social Security numbers and bank account numbers.

Until you think about what caused the problem. And how it perhaps could have been prevented. And how you fix things once they go wrong.

When you do that, the data breach at the Revenue Department becomes yet another reason our Legislature needs to pass a bill that puts the governor in charge of a new Department of Administration and transforms lawmakers’ primary job from writing laws to providing oversight of the way executive agencies administer those laws.

“This is a perfect time to do this,” Sen. Shane Massey told his colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, when someone brought up the security breach, “because if we had had legislative oversight, I believe that somewhere, someone, at some time would have asked the Department of Revenue about security.”

I believe he’s right.

Scoppe: Gun restrictions in SC? Don’t hold your breath

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 17:57 EST

HOW GUN-friendly is South Carolina’s General Assembly? Consider: Even as the Congress and state legislators the nation over scramble to pursue gun restrictions in response to the massacre in Newtown, the only bills that have been introduced in our Legislature that could even remotely be considered anti-gun are one to eliminate our annual get-your-guns-without-paying-any-taxes weekend and another to hold adults criminally responsible when children use their unsecured guns to injure or kill.

It’s a stretch to call either anti-gun, although some gun advocates do. The first is more pro-rational-tax-policy than anti-anything, since anyone who studies taxation will tell you that all of these tax-free-weekends, regardless of what goes untaxed, are gimmicks that serve mainly to distract us from serious tax reform.

And the second is a logical extension of the idea that the problem isn’t guns but bad guys with guns. In order to make that point, one of the lines of legislation that gun advocates regularly pursue involves bills such as the one Rep. Mike Pitts introduced to increase penalties for criminals who use guns to commit crimes.

That’s a perfectly reasonable idea, and Rep. Shandra Dillard’s proposal is of a piece, because it doesn’t restrict anyone; it just adds a penalty when grown-ups are so irresponsible as to make it irresistible for children to engage their weapons in dangerous ways.

I’m not convinced that South Carolina needs tougher gun laws — with the exception of the child-safety law that isn’t really anti-gun despite what the gun lobby says.

Scoppe: Haley’s overdue education conversation

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 18:02 EST

IT DIDN’T take long for Democrats to trash Gov. Nikki Haley’s invitation in her State of the State address to have “a conversation” about how to provide as good an education for children in poor school districts as for those in better-off districts.

We’ve been having that conversation for years, they huffed. We need action, not more conversation, they insisted.

And it’s true: Democrats have been having that conversation, and a few Republicans too. But outside the cloistered confines of the Senate Education Committee, Democrats and Republicans have not been having that conversation together. We as a state haven’t had that conversation.

When Gov. Haley said you can’t have a great state until all areas have the ability to be great, when she said that poor districts don’t have the tax base to adequately support the schools, she was saying things that a lot of South Carolinians — even a lot of legislators — don’t recognize.

When she told editorial writers earlier in the day that urban parents understandably don’t want to give up what their kids have but that “what I want them to understand is those kids in Bamberg deserve everything we have,” she knew that was a foreign concept for many South Carolinians.

Scoppe: Lillian McBride and the politics of race

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 09:35 EST

Editor’s note: An early version of this column included claims that were incorrectly attributed to U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn.

THE NEWS that Lillian McBride would get what is essentially her old job back, at a much higher salary, rekindled public outrage over the way the former Richland County elections director bungled the November election — as it should have.

It also revived the questions about race that have been on many people’s minds — and that’s not as it should be. In fact, it’s terribly self-defeating, because it diverts our attention from the larger problems that begat this mess, reducing the already-slim chance that we might be able to correct those problems.

Which is the sort of thing we in South Carolina seem to be experts at doing.

I received an email last week from a reader who asked me to consider an elaborately constructed role-reversal scenario, which had the county legislative delegation controlled by conservative white guys, Ms. McBride as an incompetent white guy and her deposed predecessor a highly competent black woman.

Scoppe: Can tax-cut facts cure SC tax-cut fever?

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 08:57 EST

PERHAPS OWING to it not being an election year, tax-cut fever seems to be abating at the State House.

Just 8 percent of the bills that legislators prefiled in advance of Tuesday’s opening of the 2013 General Assembly propose to cut taxes. Two Republicans even put forward plans that could increase taxes, although Sen. Greg Gregory’s bill would merely allow counties to impose a local gas tax, by referendum, and Rep. Kit Spires’ proposal to start taxing groceries again is a repeat.

And when House Republicans unveiled their agenda for the year, “Real Tax Reform” (by which they mean “real tax cuts, with maybe a couple of real reform measures thrown in for good measure”) was relegated to the fifth item on a list of seven, and introduced almost apologetically: “We knew tax reform would be a multi-year effort.”

But this is South Carolina, and as the caucus’ agenda reminds us, whenever two or more Republican legislators are gathered, there is talk of cutting taxes. For that matter, Democrats are happy to join in the orgy, although they tend to gravitate toward targeted exemptions, whereas Republicans like both loopholes and broad-based tax cuts.

So as lawmakers get back to work this week, it’s worth taking a moment to review the latest “Monday Map” from the Tax Foundation, the Washington think tank that provides more comprehensive and consistently reliable data to compare state and local taxes than any other group I’ve come across.

Scoppe: If a Martian reviewed this year’s pre-filed bills …

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 17:47 EST

IF A VISITOR from Mars tried to guess South Carolina’s most recent public policy tsunamis by perusing the 350 bills that our legislators just had to file before the 2013 General Assembly convenes today (I know; I know … I’m trying to make a point), he might conclude that we had been assaulted by a wave of high taxes, an upsurge in violent crimes and a crisis of overextended stays in our prisons.

If he focused instead on the score of bills that actually contain new ideas, the picture would be a bit more accurate: Something went terribly wrong with our elections. We’re under an identity-theft assault. And it takes too long to get a divorce.

OK, so he’d be wrong about that last one. That’s just the latest of Rep. Walt McLeod’s out-of-left-field proposals: Let couples get a no-fault divorce after just 150 days’ separation — a liberalized version of the normal six-month liberalization proposals — rather than making them wait a whole year.

But we are facing an identity-theft assault, several things did go terribly wrong with our elections, and if they don’t always have the right ideas, or ever have comprehensive ideas, our legislators do have a large number of ideas about how to respond.

They do not have a large number of ideas about the other item topping their to-do list: overhauling our ethics law. Only one bill, S.133 by Sen. Vincent Sheheen, proposes to let someone besides legislators review ethics allegations against legislators. That bill and a smattering of others also try to increase the amount of information public officials must report about their sources of income.

Scoppe: New problems, common causes, familiar solutions

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 15:29 EST

IT’S TEMPTING, in a year like this, to back off the big reforms.

After all, the Legislature has to do ethics reform and election reform and cyber security reform. It has to decide whether to throw away Medicaid money in order to make a political point, and whether to let the video poker barons have their way with our state. Again.

How, you ask, can we possibly demand more?

To which I would respond: How can we possibly settle for less?

We don’t merely face a handful of crises that have sprung up in the past year. We have generational problems, maladies that cry out for more than quick fixes, or tinkering around the edges. They cry out for bold reforms — to our tax code and our budgetary process and our education system — and a governmental structure that is nimble and responsive and accountable and competent enough to carry out those reforms.

Scoppe: Medicaid expansion will create SC jobs, increase tax revenue

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 16:03 EST

IT’S LEGITIMATE to argue that Medicaid shouldn’t be treated as a jobs generator, as Gov. Nikki Haley’s Medicaid director does.

But at least as long as our tax dollars help pay for expanded Medicaid coverage in other states, whether we accept our share of that funding or not, it’s not legitimate to ignore the jobs that an expansion would create — or the extra tax revenues those jobs would generate to offset the cost.

Money doesn’t just disappear when it’s spent on “government” or government programs. It might not be spent as efficiently as we’d like, but it’s spent, and that spending reverberates through the economy.

Pumping an extra $1.8 billion in federal Medicaid funds into our state every year will create more jobs, for doctors and nurses and pharmacists and all the support people who work in doctor’s offices and hospitals and rehab centers, and that will produce spin-off jobs when those people with new jobs buy groceries and clothing and houses and other goods and services.

And our state will collect more money in income and sales taxes when those additional people are employed and purchasing more taxable goods.

Scoppe: The SC Legislature’s special little governments

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 17:53 EST

BY S.C. standards, the byzantine arrangement that produced perhaps the worst election debacle in modern state history — an inexperienced elections director hand-picked by state legislators who thought they reserved unto themselves the exclusive ability to fire her but in fact did not, and might or might not have given that authority to a commission that they also hand-picked and can’t fire, and an elections office over which the county council has absolutely no control but must fund at a level set by an almost certainly unconstitutional state law — is practically a governmental best practice.

After all, there are only 46 of these legislative delegation-controlled/uncontrolled election commissions, each one covers an entire county, and they don’t meddle in anybody else’s business.

For a truly remarkable example of legislative meddling gone mad, consider South Carolina’s special-purpose districts, each of which provides a single service, mostly to tiny segments of the population, most of which are operated by people who are at least two steps removed from even the theoretical possibility of accountability to the public, some of which have been disguised to make voters think they have some say, when they actually don’t.

They are the tail that wags our legislative dog: These legislative creations are among the most potent political forces at the State House, capable of stymieing an array of reforms that would make local government more efficient and effective and accountable to the public. Which they do.

Did I mention that there are more than 500 of these independent fiefdoms? Which means that, when you add them to all the counties and cities and towns and school districts, we have 900 local governments in South Carolina? Talk about fragmentation.

Scoppe: Big precincts, long lines and voting machine shortages: It’s all relative

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 00:08 EST

MY FIRST inclination was to applaud Richland County legislators for thinking about maybe reconfiguring the county’s voting precincts, nearly two-thirds of which have more than the 1,500 voters that state law allows — nearly half of those with more than 1,000 extra voters, and one with nearly four times the legal limit.

But as with so very, very many things at the perilous intersection of legislative hegemony, executive authority and local self-rule, the news is only good in relative terms. Sort of like you’re much better off when you’ve only lost your job, as opposed to losing your job, your home and your family.

The fact that basic precinct maintenance has been so badly ignored for so long just underscores the problem with state legislators meddling in matters that are none of their business.

Managing precincts — making sure they are redrawn as needed to comply with applicable laws, deciding how to redraw them and where to set up polling places — are tasks that should be performed by the agency that runs elections. (And that should be a state agency, not 46 local agencies, but that’s a slightly different topic.) By professionals whose job it is to implement the laws that are passed by legislators — not by the legislators, who, except in parliamentary systems, are simply not equipped to administer laws.

At the risk of stating the obvious, a first principle of anyone in a decision-making position should be this: When you reserve unto yourself the authority to do a job, you are obliged to actually do it.

Scoppe: The Catch-22 of fixing Richland election mess

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 23:54 EST

WHEN IT comes to the 40-year struggle to extricate state legislators from local government, nothing is ever simple. The politics are always difficult, because lots of state legislators do not want to be extricated. And then there’s an Orwellian constitutional problem.

But if Senate President Pro Tem John Courson manages to navigate the political land mines and convince his fellow Richland County legislators to hand control of the county election commission over to the County Council — and to date there has been no rush to embrace the idea — it could put the Supreme Court in a position to remove one of the barriers to local control of local government.

Sen. Courson’s idea certainly is not a perfect solution to the disaster that the elections office made of last month’s voting. What legislators need to do (and needed to do before the worst election debacle in modern state history) is put the state in charge of running elections. Among other things, that idea has the advantage of being clearly constitutional.

But the Legislature has shown no interest in doing this, not only because it would require the state to assume the cost of elections rather than forcing county governments to pay for them, but also because few legislators are willing to give up control over something so precious to them as the mechanism by which they are elected.

The second-best solution is to turn control of all elections over to county councils, which at least would mean the people who fund the elections have some control over the people who run them. Hence, some modicum of accountability.

Scoppe: Constitution, schmonstitution; we’re SC legislators

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 17:18 EST

IT’S NO surprise that Richland County legislators are ignoring the attorney general’s opinion that says they don’t have the power to fire county Elections Director Lillian McBride. After all, they ignored a long string of attorney general’s opinions — and, more significantly, the Supreme Court rulings on which those opinions were based — when they passed the law last year that gave themselves the power to hire her, but not to fire her.

The problem is that laws that affect only one county are prohibited by the state constitution. That provision was adopted at the same time the Legislature created county councils, as a way of making it clear that it was no longer legislators’ job to run their counties.

There is nothing ambiguous about the provision in the constitution: “No laws for a specific county shall be enacted and no county shall be exempted from the general laws,” it says in Article VIII, Section 7. And again, in Article III, Section 34: “where a general law can be made applicable, no special law shall be enacted.”

There is nothing ambiguous about how seriously the Supreme Court takes those provisions. In its last high-profile local-law decision, in 2007, the court overturned a single-county law that devolved power from the county legislative delegation to the county council — that is, a law that accomplished the very purpose that the ban on single-county laws was designed to accomplish.

And although attorney general’s opinions are always couched in deferential disclaimers about how of course the opinion is only an opinion, and a court must decide the outcome, there’s nothing ambiguous about those opinions: Time after time, like a broken record, they warn that the laws are “constitutionally suspect” and remind legislators of that long string of Supreme Court rulings that have invalidated laws that affect a single county.

Dismantling the Legislative State, in four easy steps

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 00:05 EST

1. Empower governors. Let them hire and fire the directors of nearly all state agencies, including those now overseen by the elected education superintendent, agriculture commissioner and adjutant general, and hold them responsible for the results. This would allow governors to carry out the agenda on which voters elected them. Real gubernatorial authority will attract a more competent class of candidates.

2. Consolidate agencies. We have more than 70 agencies in the executive branch of government: six that deliver health services; five responsible for natural resources and environmental programs; four that handle jobs and economic development. We have 33 colleges and, in a state with just 46 counties, 85 school districts, some with fewer than 1,000 students. This wastes money and makes coordination and efficient management impossible.

3. Empower local governments. The power to appoint county-level officials should be turned over to county councils, or else, as with elections, the local entities should be abolished and their duties given to the state. Single-county special-purpose districts should be dismantled and their duties turned over to counties. County councils should be free to set taxes and spend money as they see fit; voters can decide whether their policies are acceptable.

Scoppe: The common root of computer hacking, election disaster: The Legislative State

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 00:26 EST

A FEW DAYS AFTER THE election that Richland County officials so thoroughly botched, during that brief period when she thought she had been re-elected — after having first been told she had lost and before eventually being told that again — County Councilwoman Val Hutchinson expressed worry that lawmakers would just kick out the director of the voting office and say they had solved the problem.

“It’s not enough to say ‘we’ll fire this one person’ and they become the scapegoat for a much larger plan,” Ms. Hutchinson said, as she called for putting the County Council instead of the county’s resident state legislators in charge of running the elections.

The next day, the former No. 3 official with the FBI, in Columbia for a conference on computer hacking, said governments make themselves particularly vulnerable when agencies operate in “silos” rather than coordinating their information technology programs. While he wasn’t privy to any details about the massive computer breach at the state Department of Revenue, Chris Swecker said hackers almost always infiltrate computer systems through top executives, who tend to be clueless about security risks.

Two breathtaking failures of our government to protect the most basic rights of its citizens, debacles that directly impact our lives in a way that few governmental failures do. One that exposed 5.7 million South Carolinians’ most sensitive financial data to theft, robbing them of their peace of mind, at the least, perhaps for the rest of their lives; one that robbed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of citizens of their vote, and stole the time, patience and trust in the electoral process from tens of thousands more. One caused by a state government controlled by Republicans, one by a county government controlled by Democrats.

And one common thread: If not precisely the predictable or inevitable fruits of the Legislative State, both fiascos were exacerbated by its legacy. Both are made more difficult to correct by its lingering effects.

Scoppe: Wanted - real answers for Richland County election debacle

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 08:58 EST

For this, we waited three weeks?

Someone misread my notes; I can’t say who.

The dog ate my homework; I can’t say which dog. Or which homework.

Let me state up front that I think we have become far too impatient. We want immediate answers even to the most complex of questions. We want action before we even have answers.

Critics were calling for Lillian McBride’s head as head of the Richland County elections office even while the votes were still being cast. Just like they were calling for the head of Revenue Director Jim Etter — and his boss, Gov. Nikki Haley — the day the governor told us about the computer breach that stole our most sensitive financial information.

Scoppe: Former AGs McMaster, Medlock serious about ethics reform

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 08:29 EST

IN 1970, THE S.C. HOUSE adopted an internal rule requiring its members to report “the nature and source” of all income they received representing clients before state agencies, and directly from utilities, banks, insurance companies, bars, manufacturers, other state-regulated businesses, and any other entities that employed lobbyists.

If that doesn’t sound like a big deal, then you haven’t read our current income-disclosure law.

And you haven’t talked with former Attorney General Travis Medlock, one of a handful of Young Turks who backed House leaders into a corner in the winter of 1970, making it impossible for them to oppose the change.

“It was real disclosure,” Mr. Medlock said, even though the requirement that representatives report the amount of income they received was stripped from the final version. “I know that because of the anger that was in that chamber during the debate.”

The memory of that debate was front and center when I met over lunch with Mr. Medlock and former Attorney General Henry McMaster to discuss their plans as co-chairmen of a commission Gov. Nikki Haley created last month to propose an overhaul of our ethics, campaign finance and open-government laws.

Scoppe: Is SC computer breach transforming Gov. Nikki Haley?

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 09:14 EST

“The one thing I think I’ve learned in this is you can’t talk in absolutes.”

— Gov. Nikki Haley

IT’S TRUE that there’s nothing we could have done to guarantee that our state would never be hacked. It might even be true that nobody should be disciplined, or kicked out of office, for what they did or didn’t do that made us vulnerable to the massive security breach at the Revenue Department.

But it’s not true that nothing could have prevented a hacker from accessing 4.25 million unencrypted tax returns. At a minimum, the Revenue Department could have encrypted its database, as the state Department of Motor Vehicles and other agencies have done to guard against computer hacking. It could have had tighter security protocols, so that perhaps the employee who did something that allowed the hacker in would have been more careful.

Yet from her first public utterances, Gov. Nikki Haley insisted that there was nothing anyone in state government could have done to prevent the breach.

Scoppe: Legislative appointees: the protected class

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 17:09 EST

LILLIAN McBRIDE is not an anomaly.

What distinguishes the head of Richland County’s election office from most legislative appointees is her high-wire failure, so spectacularly demonstrated first by four-, five-, seven-hour waits to vote and then by an unending string of malfunctions and missteps through more than a week’s efforts to count the ballots of those who persevered to cast a ballot.

But that very failure highlights the thing that makes Ms. McBride typical of officials appointed by state legislators: She’s bulletproof.

Like every legislative appointee I can think of, Ms. McBride can’t be fired by the legislators who hired her. That’s not because a few holdouts have manipulated legislative rules to prevent the vast majority of the Legislature from changing an antiquated law that makes it ridiculously difficult if not impossible to get rid of officials who aren’t up to the job. The very legislators who hired Ms. McBride wrote the law that prevents them from firing her — just last year.

That same law, as is typical, also gave Richland County’s legislators the power to hire — but not to fire — the members of the part-time board that technically oversees Ms. McBride’s office but that has no authority to remove her.

Scoppe: Richland County election debacle brought to you by single-county laws

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 18:36 EST

IT’S BAD ENOUGH that the part-time board that oversees Richland County’s election and voter registration agency has concluded that it can’t fire Lillian McBride for her Election Day — and night, and day after — debacle.

But if you read the law as strictly as Election Commission Chairwoman Liz Crum does — and the Columbia attorney frequently represents the state in election-law cases — I don’t see any way the local legislators who hired Ms. McBride have any authority to fire her either.

Add this to the list of sins of Richland County’s state legislators, who single-handedly wrote that law.

This latest blunder shouldn’t surprise anyone who pays close attention to the way our Legislature actually operates, as opposed to the way we learned in civics class. But to casual observers … well, this might be a good time to start tuning in.

The problem is single-county laws, which local legislators used to write in order to avoid having to create county governments. Eventually, they gave in and created county councils, and even amended the state constitution to outlaw nearly all single-county laws. Still, they kept passing those unconstitutional laws, and as long as no one files suit, the laws are valid.

Scoppe: The cure for long lines on Election Day? Early voting

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 17:24 EST

BY THE time I got in line to vote late Tuesday afternoon, on my third try of the day, my precinct had six voting machines. That was 86 percent of what state law required, and 50 percent more than it had for most of the day. So at just 90 minutes, my wait was relatively short.

Which is ridiculous.

It looks at this point as though incompetence at the newly reconfigured Richland County Election Commission contributed to the local debacle that kept people waiting in line for two to four hours throughout the day and held some hostage until past 1 a.m. Twenty percent of the county’s 1,000 voting machines weren’t deployed, apparently because they were broken — and many that were deployed turned out not to work. That made it impossible for the commission to obey state law that requires it to use about 950 machines, and suggests that it wasn’t paying attention to its inventory or didn’t understand that it needed to seek funding to repair them or purchase replacements.

But one- and two-hour waits were not uncommon across the state. And as the population grows, they’re only going to get longer.

A small price to pay for democracy? Well, it depends on your situation.

Scoppe: How much would you give up to vote? And should you have to?

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 13:07 EST

Reprinted from Nov. 13, 2008

Columbia, SC — I GOT UP an hour early on Election Day, foolishly thinking I could avoid the crowd if I showed up at my polling place a few minutes before 7. Wrong. At 6:50 a.m., the closest place to park was three long blocks away, and several people weren’t even driving, but walking from their homes. I went to the office an hour early.

I tried again at 11, hoping to beat the lunch crowd. This time I snagged a parking spot someone had just vacated, within a block; I walked into the school building, looked at the line snaking three times through the gym, up the stairs, down a hall and who knows how far around that corner, and went back to work.

A bit before 4, I tried again.

I had no idea what to expect — or what I would do. Was I willing to wait an hour, two, more, to vote in a presidential election in which I would be perfectly happy with either winner, U.S. Senate and House races whose outcomes were not in doubt, legislative, County Council and countywide non-races where the incumbents were unopposed? (“You need to set an example,” my priest had admonished me on Sunday when I mused about doing the unthinkable — not voting.) I didn’t have to answer the question: This time, the street was virtually empty; the line had evaporated, and only two other voters were in sight. More than half the time I spent in my polling place was chatting with poll workers, who reported that the crowds started dissipating around 2.

Scoppe: Lieutenant governor out of order in SC Senate

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 23:56 EDT

IT’S HARD TO find anyone you’ve ever heard of who admits to opposing the proposal to let gubernatorial candidates pick their running mates.

Little wonder. The only legitimate argument for electing the lieutenant governor independently of the governor is that changing it would deprive voters of a choice. And with nine separately elected statewide offices, on top of federal, legislative and local elections, that’s a tough argument to make, particularly considering all the benefits of the change.

What you may hear, though, is that the constitutional amendment on Tuesday’s ballot is a nefarious Senate power grab, dressed up to look like the sort of reform we need to make governors a little more effective and lieutenant governors a little less useless. The only way that we the people can retain control of our government, this conspiracy theory goes, is to reject the amendment.

It’s charitable to call that a red herring. What critics are pouncing on is the provision that eliminates the lieutenant governor’s role as presiding officer of the Senate and allows the Senate instead to pick its own presiding officer from among its membership, just like the House does.

I am convinced that getting the lieutenant governor out of the Senate chamber strikes a blow for the separation-of-powers doctrine. Consider how ridiculous it would be for a senator to serve as chief justice, or for a judge to be the governor’s chief of staff, and you begin to realize how bizarre it is to have a member of the executive branch preside over the Senate.

Scoppe: The good incumbents

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 16:12 EDT

THE LEGISLATURE is an increasingly frustrating disappointment.

It keeps making the antiquated tax system even more convoluted, and flirting with disastrous proposals. It devotes serious political energy to schemes to pay parents to abandon the schools rather than working to improve them. It won’t give the governor the tools to run the state — or itself the tools to provide effective legislative oversight. It squanders its time on local matters that other people are elected to handle while ignoring crucial state matters that only it can address. And let’s not even talk about what passes for ethics rules and the much-touted but little-practiced “transparency” craze.

It’s enough to make the most cockeyed optimist fall in behind the throw-the-bums-out parade.

Yet our editorial board just refused to endorse a single candidate challenging legislative incumbents. Does this make any sense at all?

Actually, yes. The idea of replacing incumbents at every opportunity is pure nihilism. It’s based on a feeling of helplessness, which grows out of a misunderstanding of what it is that prevents our Legislature from producing the kind of laws that are favored by the overwhelming majority of South Carolinians, regardless of political party.

Scoppe: SC photo voter ID law much ado — and money, and political energy — about nothing

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 14:40 EDT

IN CASE ANYONE was confused about exactly what difference it will make now that South Carolina has permission to implement the new photo ID voter law that Gov. Nikki Haley used to trash-talk the Obama administration at the Republican National Convention, the federal judges who unanimously approved it last week offer this explanation:

“South Carolina’s new law … does not require a photo ID to vote.”

And this: “voters with the non-photo voter registration card that sufficed to vote under pre-existing law may still vote without a photo ID.”

And this: “Act R54 will deny no voters the ability to vote and have their votes counted if they have the non-photo voter registration card that could be used to vote under pre-existing South Carolina law.”

And, in case you haven’t been beat over the head enough, this bit of commentary: “At first blush, one might have thought South Carolina had enacted a very strict photo ID law. Much of the initial rhetoric surrounding the law suggested as much. But that rhetoric was based on a misunderstanding of how the law would work. Act R54, as it has been authoritatively construed by South Carolina officials, does not have the effects that some expected and some feared.”

Scoppe: Katrina Shealy v. Jake Knotts: no good option in SC Senate rematch

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 11:07 EDT

FOUR YEARS ago, I squeezed my nose as tight as I could and wrote an endorsement of Sen. Jake Knotts. No one on our editorial board felt good about it, because the Lexington Republican has always gone out of his way to antagonize and provoke, to debase the debate, to fight changes that South Carolina needs and advance changes we don’t need.

But then-Gov. Mark Sanford had teamed up with Howie Rich to make Mr. Knotts the top target in the N.Y. multimillionaire’s quest to buy himself a Legislature that would pay parents to abandon the public schools. And challenger Katrina Shealy refused to denounce Mr. Rich and all the money he was pouring into her campaign — or even to state her position on his private-school-choice agenda. So we found ourselves in the uncomfortable position of having to choose not a candidate but a team: the Sanford-Rich-public-education-assault team, or the other team.

Since then, Jake Knotts has become even less attractive.

He has continued his assault on efforts to empower the governor, this year helping to kill legislation on the cusp of passage that finally would have abolished the Budget and Control Board.

He has received the first-ever public reprimand from the Senate Ethics Committee, for accepting illegally large donations, some of which he didn’t even report. He spins this as a positive, saying it forced him to correct sloppy record-keeping and resulted in Senate rules changes that improved ethics compliance. Deliberate or not, he undermined two of the primary purposes of our campaign-finance law — to show voters who is trying to influence candidates, and to limit the influence of any one donor — and accepted illegal donations that helped him defeat Ms. Shealy in the 2008 GOP primary.

Scoppe: More serendipitous enforcement of SC ethics law

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 17:13 EDT

WHILE reform groups were fixating over House Speaker Bobby Harrell’s flight records, legislative candidates were competing to propose the toughest ethics reforms and Sen. Jake Knotts was spinning his public reprimand as a “clean audit” of his campaign records, the Senate Ethics Committee last month quietly issued its second-ever such reprimand — and, thanks to a Knotts-inspired reform, its first-ever serious fine.

Ethics reform is the it issue on the campaign trail thanks to the disaster of former Lt. Gov. Ken Ard, a groundbreaking national study that named South Carolina the nation’s sixth most corruptible state, the off-again-on-again-off-again investigation of Gov. Nikki Haley’s efforts as a House member on behalf of her private employers, and now questions about the skimpy details Mr. Harrell gave for $280,000 he reimbursed himself from campaign funds, mostly for flights on his own plane.

Contrary to critics’ protestations, there has so far been nothing to indicate that the governor or the speaker violated the law. That’s because the law is so forgiving.

A forgiving law isn’t precisely the problem in the case of Sen. Kent Williams, but his public reprimand points to another significant shortcoming in our ethics and campaign finance law that isn’t getting much attention. Left uncorrected, it could greatly diminish the value of any new reporting requirements the Legislature passes, leaving them dependent on the honesty of the candidates filing the reports.

According to the Senate Ethics Committee, Mr. Williams accepted 15 contributions in excess of the legal maximum of $1,000 for this year’s election. It ordered him to return the extra $12,801 and pay a $5,390.05 fine. The Marion County Democrat, who is running unopposed for his third term, did not contest the charges.