TheState.com: Cindi Scoppe

Scoppe: I Believe Bauer, McMaster are insulting Christians, abusing offices

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:41 EST

THE ONE saving grace in the "I Believe" fiasco is that it shouldn't cost taxpayers much money to pick up the tab for the busybodies who brought suit against the political panderers who wanted to emblazon license tags with a cross-emblazoned stained-glass window and the words "I Believe."

Challenging those tags, after all, didn't exactly take a lot of legal heavy lifting - a fact that U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie certainly ought to keep in mind when she decides what level of fees to approve. The case law was so clear that a first-year law student probably could have put together the complaint.

Which of course is what makes this whole thing so outrageous.

There are a lot of church-state cases that are close calls. This was never one of them, and the roles played by the unanimous General Assembly, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer and, worst of all, Attorney General Henry McMaster have been a textbook case of irresponsibility.

Now, I don't mean to say that allowing drivers to pick the "I Believe" tag instead of the apple for education tag or the shag tag or the "Gone Fishing" tag is an obvious violation of the Constitution. I personally have a hard time finding a problem with optional religious license plates in the words of the First Amendment - "Congress (and by later extension the states) shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." It seems to me that the courts have, over the years, stretched the definition of "establish" way beyond recognition, as our society has become further and further removed from the context in which it was added to the Constitution: Many Protestants had fled to the New World in order to escape an established Church of England, to which the government was inextricably linked.

Scoppe: Ruling suggests a court grown weary of Mark Sanford

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:28 EST

THE MOST telling language in the Supreme Court ruling that rejected Gov. Mark Sanford's pathetic contention that waiving his confidentiality doesn't really mean waiving his confidentiality is in Footnote 8.

The footnote doesn't specifically use the term "whiny, deceptive liar" - just as the ruling itself doesn't come out and say that the court is hoisting the governor upon his own petard. But that's what the footnote says, and that's what the opinion does.

The point made in the footnote is that the governor is flat wrong when he argues that the public shouldn't see a preliminary investigation into his travel and campaign spending because "he will not get a chance to present 'his side of the story'" until much later in the process. In fact, the footnote says, "the plain language of the statute refutes the Governor's contention" and "Counsel for the Commission confirmed at oral argument that the Governor has been allowed to offer information during the investigatory process, and has availed himself of that opportunity."

Now that might sound like a pretty obvious point to make but for this fact: The court said in the body of the opinion that Mr. Sanford's "tell his side of the story" objection was irrelevant because he had issued a sweeping waiver of any and all confidentiality rights. In other words, there was no legal reason to refute this particular objection.

There apparently was, however, another reason. I don't want to call it political, because that has all sorts of implications, when dealing with a court, that I don't think would be fair to apply here. You might call it personal, or perhaps professional.

Scoppe: The thing that's worse than 'you lie!'

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:14 EST

U.S. REP. JIM Clyburn stopped by to chat the other day, and as usual I was a little put off by how partisan he is.

But I suppose that comes with the territory when you're majority whip. Besides, I know more than a few Republicans who are every bit as certain as he is that the world is easily and obviously categorized into neat little "Republican" and "Democratic" boxes.

Mr. Clyburn also has a disputatious approach toward our editorial board that I don't consider justified. Which brings us to Joe Wilson.

I don't recall how it was that the congressman from Columbia's black congressional district came to talk about the congressman from Columbia's white congressional district (if you don't like that characterization, blame the Legislature - please - which deliberately drew a black district and a white district that bisected this community), but at one point Mr. Clyburn asserted that if he had yelled out "You lie" during a congressional address by President George W. Bush, our editorial board would have demanded his resignation.

I protested that I could not imagine treating him any differently than we had treated Mr. Wilson: I wrote a column condemning his outburst and saying his White House apology was a start but insufficient, and then we turned our attention back to state and local matters. But the Richland Democrat remained adamant, even when I pointed out that Warren Bolton and I are the people who decide what the editorial board says, and then say it. As far as he was concerned, we didn't hit the Lexington Republican hard enough for his outburst.

Scoppe: What we learned from the weird debate

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:51 EST

THERE USUALLY is an inverse relationship between the number of candidates on the stage and the usefulness of a debate. Too many people leaves almost no chance for back and forth between two candidates and makes it difficult even for questioners to concentrate on what any one of them says, which means candidates don't get pinned down and challenged the way they should.

So combine 10 candidates, from both parties, with a debate a year out from the Republican-Democratic match-up, and last week's gubernatorial debate had all the makings of a colossal waste of time.

Surprisingly, it wasn't. I'm not saying we learned enough about the candidates even to get a good start on the winnowing process, but I think it probably was useful to be able to see them all in one place, just this once, to help us form general impressions.

Not surprisingly, the debate was most effective at giving a feel for the candidates - which wasn't necessarily a good thing for most of them.

I tend to judge candidates by their ideas and intelligence, their integrity and principles. But for most people, at least as important is how they look and sound, and on this count, there were some real surprises. Dwight Drake, one of the most successful lobbyists and lawyers in the state, seemed unpolished. Attorney General Henry McMaster and Education Superintendent Jim Rex came off at some points as comfortingly calm and low-key, other times as plodding. Sen. Vincent Sheheen seemed to lack dynamism and heft. Sen. Larry Grooms, on the other hand, was much too eager a beaver, while Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer sometimes tripped over the line between giving detailed answers and trying too hard.

Scoppe: Legislators behaving ... nicely?

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:53 EST

WHEN I asked Larry Martin whether castigations of the governor already had begun during the brief few minutes the Senate had been in session before breaking for lunch Tuesday, the chairman of the powerful Senate Rules Committee immediately shushed me.

"We've about got everybody under control," he said. "Don't give them any ideas."

Not that anyone needed to.

Last week's two-day session of the Legislature will come to be known as the Boeing session, but it started off as something very different. If ever there was a set-up for a name-calling, finger-pointing, score-cheap-political-points session of the Legislature, it was last week. There were plenty of juicy targets, plenty of people who had every right to blame others for the unemployment benefits mess that lawmakers had been summoned back to town to clean up, and plenty more - including what, a half-dozen gubernatorial candidates? - who easily could have decided to capitalize on that mess to try to grab the attention of the abundant media on hand for just such potentialities.

Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter could point a finger at majority Republicans for letting federal unemployment benefits run out on thousands of laid-off South Carolinians by refusing to even give a hearing to her bill that would have prevented the problem ever happening.

Scoppe: We're in the game; let's not blow it

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:52 EDT

EVERYBODY'S calling it a game-changer.

I hope they're right.

South Carolina could sure use a new game.

For much of the past decade, South Carolina has been on a frightful economic slide. It wasn't so noticeable when the national economy was roaring ahead at dizzying speeds and our leaky little boat was being carried along by the rising tide, simply not moving as fast as everyone else's. But when the recession hit everyone in the gut and then kept punching, it became painfully clear that we have serious problems that other states don't.

Low wages. High unemployment.

Scoppe: The insidious little lie about drop-out rates, part 3

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:17 EDT

THINK OF THIS as a teachable moment.

Shortly after my column ran explaining that South Carolina's on-time high school graduation rate is much higher than the 50 percent range that critics try to brainwash us into believing, the spokesman for the private school "choice" group SCRG submitted an op-ed that, essentially, criticized me for not using the bogus graduation numbers that I spent the entire column discrediting. Only he didn't put it that way; he made it sound as though his figures were numbers I had simply omitted. The term "cherry-picking" was included.

Combine that central flaw with the fact that the column accused me of positions that I have not taken and implicitly accused me of not taking positions that I have taken, and you're left with a piece that, edited to not be horribly misleading, doesn't make much sense. Normally, I would simply reject something like that, even though I give a strong preference to columns that disagree with our positions, and a stronger preference still to those that take direct issue with something I personally have written.

But since one of the major goals of my earlier column was to shed light on the whole brainwashing operation, this seemed like a good opportunity to illustrate the tactics that are used.

The column by Neil Mellen appears here. Because most of the claims are not technically incorrect, it is printed largely as submitted. The one exception is a paragraph near the end, where he lumped me in with the "public school bureaucracy" as working to "persuade parents and taxpayers to perpetually stay the course on the hope that public schools will improve" through the expenditure of "ever more money." I couldn't leave such a demonstrably untrue claim in the column, so I removed my name, which is why the column seems so abrupt when it returns to me two paragraphs later.

Scoppe: The problems with the Delleney standard for impeachment

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:05 EDT

REP. GREG Delleney sees impeachment, under the broad language in our constitution, as closely akin to voter recall: Whether the governor of California gets kicked out a year into his term depends entirely on the political will of the voters.

That's why the Chester attorney, who is the leading advocate of impeachment and who almost certainly will chair the subcommittee that will put together any case against the governor, is convinced that Mark Sanford's Argentine vacation is reason aplenty to impeach the governor.

There's no question that the constitution gives the Legislature broad latitude in determining what is and is not "serious misconduct." Certainly, as Mr. Delleney argues, it does not have to involve the criminal offense that we call "misconduct in office" - or any criminal offense, for that matter.

But while his argument is no doubt appealing to populists - and to anyone who just wants Mr. Sanford gone, regardless of the implications for future governors - his legal reasoning should give his fellow representatives pause.

Mr. Delleney believes the governor engaged in dereliction of duty when he made himself incommunicado for five days in June. Add the fact that Mr. Sanford "covered it up by deceit and misleading, and he involved his staff in that deceit and misleading" and went on to heap "shame and humiliation" upon the state, and the Democrat-turned-Republican sees a slam-dunk case. Anything that comes of the ethics investigation into the governor's travel and use of campaign funds, he believes, could be added to his case but would be simply that - an addition.

Scoppe: It's time for lawmakers to talk about Mark Sanford

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:53 EDT

REASONABLE people can disagree over whether Gov. Mark Sanford should resign. My colleague Warren Bolton and I certainly have consumed meeting time struggling with the question.

While Warren, for his own reasons, is a little further along than I am, I get closer every day to saying Mr. Sanford needs to go. I have been hesitant to do that not because I consider his summer actions acceptable or believe he is a good governor or has the moral authority to govern or that there is any possibility that he can accomplish anything good for our state, but because of my concerns that his resignation could skew the critical 2010 gubernatorial election in ways we would regret far beyond 2010.

But while we debate with each other - or even with ourselves -what should happen, the reality is that he does not appear to be going anywhere. That means our most important task is to limit the damage that his presence does to our state, to prevent him from taking lawmakers' focus and time completely away from the pressing needs of our state. Because we simply cannot afford to squander yet another legislative session on Mark Sanford's antics.

Based on what we know (and barring something highly unexpected coming out of the Ethics Commission report, we have all the relevant facts), impeachment is not the answer.

As irresponsible as the governor's Argentine vacation was, as hypocritical and likely illegal as his taxpayer-funded travel has been and as useless as he is and likely will continue to be as our governor, nothing we have seen so far clears what I believe should be the extremely high hurdle for legislators to override the will of the public, as demonstrated through the 2006 election.

Scoppe: There's plenty of blame to go around for jobless benefits blunder

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:23 EDT

IT'S DIFFICULT to comprehend the combination of incompetence, passive-aggressive hostility and political dysfunction that allowed the Legislature to go home this spring without making a simple, no-cost-to-South Carolinians change to state law that would have allowed more than 30,000 laid-off South Carolinians to receive up to 20 additional weeks of unemployment benefits.

To borrow a tired cliche, we have a system of government that was guaranteed to fail in the perfect storm of an agency director who was under fire and didn't bother raising the alarm, a Legislature that was too busy playing political games to do anything once a lobbyist raised the issue and a governor who had so muddied the waters and created so much anger that the unemployed - whom he had been using as pawns since last fall - got lost in the shuffle.

The most direct blame goes to Ted Halley, the embattled director of the state Employment Security Commission who received numerous warnings from the U.S. Labor Department that state law needed to be changed to ensure laid-off workers could receive extended benefits under the federal stimulus law but didn't bother mentioning it to the Legislature because, he told The Post and Courier's Katy Stech, the information already was in the stimulus bill. That explanation is reminiscent of his response when pressed earlier this year on why he and his agency hadn't been more aggressive about letting the Legislature know that the trust fund that pays unemployment benefits was running out of money. In subsequent interviews, Mr. Halley has said he didn't think South Carolina's jobless rate would ever get so high that the state would need to use the federal government's alternative formula - sort of like he didn't think our jobless rate would get high enough last year that the state would have to borrow money from the federal government to keep paying out benefits.

At the risk of crossing the line from political analysis into psychoanalysis, it looks like the director, already taking heat from every direction and trying desperately to fight off threats by the governor to fire him and the Legislature to make it easy for the governor to do that, allowed the boulder on his shoulder to get in the way of doing his job of looking out for the jobless. On the day news of this bungle broke, Mr. Halley, who previously had announced he would retire at the end of the year, moved that date up to Nov. 8.

It's unclear how much blame should go to Mr. Halley's three bosses, the three former legislators who hold full-time, no-qualifications-required jobs as Employment Security commissioners, but clearly they are not blameless. One of them, former Rep. Becky Richardson, says Mr. Halley never told the commissioners about the potential problem; but Mr. Halley told The Associated Press' Jim Davenport that a decision about whether to ask the Legislature to act "is never made without consulting commissioners."

What stop of Sanford’s car tells us about S.C. law enforcement

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 03:05 EDT

THE CASE of the governor’s SLED agent/driver and the Highway Patrol trooper is worth lingering over, not because of what it tells us about Mark Sanford but because of what it tells us about law enforcement in our state.

It seems safe to say, at the least, that top police officials handled this situation much better than the previous roadside encounters with a politician that made headlines.

First, a bit of perspective, since that seems so hard to come by in matters concerning Mr. Sanford.

A number of Sanford supporters have complained that there was nothing newsworthy about the fact that a trooper stopped the governor’s car for doing 20 mph over the speed limit but walked away without giving the driver so much as a warning; they say it wouldn’t even have been reported had the sharks not already been circling the governor. They’re simply wrong. Public Safety Director Mark Keel and SLED Chief Reggie Lloyd, through their responses, prevented this from becoming a huge deal, which is why it was largely a twoday news story. But any time something out of the ordinary occurs in a car in which the governor is riding, it’s news, whether that something was good or bad, whether the governor’s approval rating is 5 percent or 100 percent.

On the other end of the spectrum, some Sanford critics have likened this incident to Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer’s personal ticket avoidance. That’s an absurd comparison. The lieutenant governor was actually driving the speeding vehicle, not riding in it; he was driving at triple-digit speeds, not 20 miles over the speed limit; he acted deceptively to make the trooper believe he was a high-ranking police officer; he never was ticketed. Oh, and the Highway Patrol leadership handled that matter horribly, sending the message to troopers and the public that the normal rules don’t apply to VIPs.

Scoppe: A lesson in honest, civil discourse

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:08 EDT

ED SELLERS is surprisingly disarming for an insurance executive.

It doesn't hurt that the head of the insurance behemoth BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina is a policy wonk with a strong geek streak. I remember one meeting where he noticed that one of his charts wasn't drawn to scale; for the rest of the meeting, he kept coming back, apologetically and increasingly fretfully, to that error. If you're someone who tries to deal honestly with numbers, you have to be impressed by that fixation, which is foreign to most politicians who like to play with numbers and increasingly alien even in journalism.

But the main thing that makes him disarming is his willingness to deal fairly with opinions that differ from his own, to even explain why critics would disagree with what he says and, on occasion, concede that they have a legitimate point - just one he does not share. I was struck anew by this when he met with news reporters and our editorial board recently to talk about the most demagogued issue I can recall, the one that has set new lows in incivility - health care reform.

Now, Mr. Sellers does not pretend to be a disinterested party; he leaves no doubt that he's an insurance executive, with a strong stake in the debate. And he makes an aggressive case for why he believes some proposals would be disastrous and why his preferred way is better - which is what sets him apart from most people who oppose the central points of the legislation: He actually makes a case.

The loud-mouth know-nothings spit out such emotion-laden, debate-stopper terms as "socialized medicine" and "communism" and declare that a public option (or any reform, it seems) will send granny off to the gas chamber and give the government the access code to your ATM card. Mr. Sellers brings in charts and graphs (these are drawn to scale) that show how over time a public option that pays below-market rates would shift more costs to hospitals and eventually drive consumers out of the private marketplace, creating a de facto single-payer system; yet he concedes that support of single-payer is "a defensible point of view."

Scoppe: The scandalette that wasn't supposed to happen

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:10 EDT

IT'S MORE than a bit ironic that the first little ethics explosion of the 2010 gubernatorial campaign should be over campaign donations that Attorney General Henry McMaster accepted from lawyers he approved to file a multimillion-dollar lawsuit on behalf of the state.

Mr. McMaster, who watched both of his predecessors get into hot water for accepting donations from lawyers they picked to represent the state, had gone to great lengths to try to insulate himself from such problems.

Shortly after taking office in 2003, he started getting calls from attorneys who wanted to chat about bringing what are essentially class-action lawsuits on behalf of the state. This type of arrangement is not uncommon, because both sides stand to benefit if the suit is successful:

Some suits can only be brought in the name of the state, and even when there is no such restriction, suing on behalf of the state rather than trying as an individual attorney to hold together a class-action suit can streamline and speed up the process, and add an unquantifiable heft to the case.

For their part, attorneys general usually don't have the staff or expertise to bring complex civil suits themselves, much less front the expenses that can mount up for years before a settlement or verdict, and so approving "outside counsel" can serve the public interest - as when the state is able to recover millions of dollars that drug companies overcharged Medicaid. (The practice also can lead to attorneys general turning themselves into super-legislatures, using the courts to try to change policy in a way that the people elected to do that sort of thing won't.)

Scoppe: Air-conditioned bathrooms and other political targets

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:45 EDT

DON'T SWEAT it, students and parents: Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer is not on a crusade to strip the air conditioning out of school bathrooms.

It just sounded like that during the GOP gubernatorial debate last month, the lieutenant governor assured me after I noted with bemusement his complaint that schools are wasting money air conditioning bathrooms.

His target, he explained, was air-conditioned bathrooms in new high school football stadiums. ("They don't even have air-conditioned bathrooms at Carolina and Clemson," the former USC cheerleader said.)

Mr. Bauer said he added the complaint about stadium-bathroom air-conditioning to his list of wasteful spending after a contractor told him about one such project that he had been hired to work on. The lieutenant governor and probable though not absolutely certain gubernatorial candidate has not yet been able to confirm the charge - when he called the district in question, he got a brush-off - but he's trying to pin it down.

If the story pans out, it's a truly fabulous little exclamation point to his on-point criticism about the proliferation of high school football stadiums. ("Dutch Fork and Irmo used to share a stadium," he said. "But not anymore. It's so much smarter to say, let's tough it out these seven times a year we use a football stadium.")

Scoppe: The insidious little lie about dropouts, part 2

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:36 EDT

I'VE WRITTEN several times that the strategy of those being paid to try to divert tax dollars to private schools is not just to run down our public schools but to exaggerate or even lie about their shortcomings. It doesn't matter how many times I and others correct their misstatements; they are fully aware of the truth to the cliche: Tell a lie often enough, and people begin to believe it.

Today I present Exhibit A of the cliche in action: me.

Last week, I wrote that Attorney General Henry McMaster was wrong when he said that half of S.C. students drop out of school in 10th grade. So far so good.

But then I pulled up short, saying that "half" refers to the students who do not graduate in four years. In fact, that's not right either: Some of the dozen or so different methods to calculate that number did yield figures around 50 percent a few years ago. But those methods have been discarded as a consensus has formed around one or two of the dozen ways of deriving the number, and besides, our state has made dramatic (though insufficient) improvement since then.

This isn't simply a matter of my not being tough enough on a candidate, and in fact I doubt that Mr. McMaster meant to deceive. Rather, it is a pretty dramatic example of how effective the leaders of the anti-public school movement have been at brainwashing our entire state.

Scoppe: Another day, another special-interest tax break, or two

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:30 EDT

YOU MIGHT have been surprised to learn, well after the fact, about the sweet little tax break the Legislature gave home builders this spring. You shouldn't have been. That's the way most tax breaks get done: They're pushed by a small but vocal (or persistent) group, and they're small enough that they generate little resistance and less debate.

At first blush, it's not entirely clear that there's anything wrong with this particular break, which officials estimate will affect only about 500 houses and be worth only about $1.5 million a year. (Actually, at very first blush, it's not at all clear what it does.) Second blush reveals that there are some problems with it, the biggest of which is that it's part of a pattern: The Legislature keeps passing these individual little tax cuts or (much more rarely) tax increases, which serve to grease the squeaky wheel, and it doesn't bother to notice that the rest of the vehicle is falling apart.

The home over-builders' rescue act is particularly notable because it zipped through the Legislature at the very time that legislative leaders were proclaiming and the Legislature was pledging devotion to comprehensive tax reform. To break this cycle of piecemeal tax changes that has made our tax code a muddled mess of special exemptions and exceptions for special people, the cumulative effect of which is to require the state to keep some tax rates twice as high as they would have to be if we didn't have all those loopholes.

H.3018 was borne of one home builder's frustration with having to pay property taxes on two houses he couldn't unload. Charleston developer Chuck Bennett told The Post and Courier that his two unoccupied houses place few demands on local services, and so paying $16,000 a year in property taxes meant "I'm just writing a check for nothing."

Home builders always have had the ear of the Legislature, and with the real estate market tanking and taking those builders down with it, it was even harder than usual for legislators to say no to them this year; so they didn't. Gov. Mark Sanford's veto was barely a speed bump on the way to the bill's passage. Under the law that took effect in June, home builders still must pay taxes on the land, but they get a six-year grace period for taxes on the house; Mr. Bennett expects to pay about $7,000 instead of $16,000 this year.

Scoppe: The House GOP Caucus perspective on Mark Sanford

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:36 EDT

KENNY BINGHAM begs to differ.

The Lexington businessman, who serves in the unenviable position of House Republican leader at a time when House Republicans are talking seriously about impeaching the Republican governor, called the other day to complain that I had maligned the House when I wrote that Mark Sanford's presence in office is not keeping the Legislature from accomplishing anything because the Legislature doesn't do anything during the July-through-December "off" season.

Complain probably is a strong word, and so is malign, because Mr. Bingham is a very nice person, and he agreed with most of the points I had made. (I made the point about the Legislature being out of session not so much to discredit the claims by Mr. Bingham and House Speaker Bobby Harrell that the governor had become too big a distraction but rather to tamp down public demands that legislators stop "wasting time" and get back to the business of the state.)

I thought Mr. Bingham made one very good point about distractions and had one fascinating observation about the governor. Beyond that, as the person who wrote the letter urging Gov. Sanford to resign, signed by 61 of the 72 House Republicans, he offers a valuable perspective on what's driving the people who will decide whether the governor is impeached.

His very good point: The distraction problem is less that legislators won't stop talking and thinking about the governor, and exploiting this situation for their own personal gain, as I had described it, than that they can't escape it. Every time there's a new development, constituents call or e-mail or stop them at dinner or after church and ask what they think about it, what they're going to do about it.

Scoppe: Random observations from the first face-off

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:05 EDT

IN AN EFFORT to write about something other than He Who Must Not Be Named Because Everyone Is Sick Of Reading About Him, today I offer random thoughts about the only other recent state news buffet - last week's inaugural Republican gubernatorial debate. In no particular order:

- I was struck by the case made by U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett, and to a lesser extent by Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, for the necessary role of government in our lives, particularly in terms of creating the physical and societal infrastructure we take for granted. It was not the best case I've ever heard, but it was notable that they would make it at a time when the "government is the problem" wing of the party seems to be on the ascendancy.

- Mr. Bauer did a good job of arguing that his high-profile screw-ups should be considered in the context of his entire record. And watching the debate convinced me that it's unfair to make him defend his offer to bow out of the race if the governor steps down or is impeached by next month. Question his sincerity if you will, or his political calculation or whether he can be trusted to keep his word. But don't attack the man for doing what anyone in his position should do - but few would - if he thought his candidacy was hurting our state.

- All the candidates dutifully denounced the federal bailout of state governments, but beyond that there were some subtle differences. Rep. Nikki Haley made a point of saying our state must never again accept federal bail-out money.

By indirect but notable contrast, Attorney General Henry McMaster pointedly declined to attack the decision to let the federal government bail out our unemployment insurance fund, repeatedly saying "we have to take care of the unemployed." (On the other hand, Mr. McMaster did have that disturbing paean to John C. Calhoun's nullification campaign.)

Scoppe: A tax lesson from the first gubernatorial debate

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 18:24 EDT

THE HEADLINES out of the first Republican gubernatorial debate were dominated by the not-terribly surprising news that all five participants support school vouchers and oppose crawling back into the Confederate flag debate, and the even-less-surprising observation that they were in general agreement on everything else.

General elections get us so accustomed to candidates who would argue over whether the sun rises in the east that we're ill-prepared for the homogeneity when primaries roll back around. If the strategy in general elections is to distinguish yourself from your opponent, the strategy in primaries is to play to the base. As Attorney General Henry McMaster quipped when the moderator remarked on the candidates' unanimity on two consecutive yes-no questions, "We're all Republicans."

That's not to say there are no differences beyond style, experience and the all-important emphasis. You just have to listen more closely to notice them. Doing that yielded several in Wednesday's debate, the most telling of which involved taxes.

There's a general perception that the only approaches to taxes are to raise them or lower them. But in fact, you can raise or lower taxes, or leave the overall level of taxation alone, in a smart way or in a stupid way (we usually pick stupid in South Carolina, no matter which direction we go) - as the only two candidates who addressed tax policy more than in passing demonstrated.

Both Mr. McMaster and Sen. Larry Grooms are on the lower-taxes side, so their comments might have sounded similar, but they were nearly 180 degrees apart.

Scoppe: A glimmer of a hint of hope for a less irrational government

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:53 EDT

AS HE WAS heading out of town with Jenny and the boys on their European vacation last month, the governor called to say he thought something good could come out of this whole mess: He was beginning to sense that legislators finally were warming up to government restructuring now that it was no longer possible that he could use such a significant victory as a launching board for another office.

I said something politely (but not sincerely) optimistic and dismissed the whole thing as just another bizarre Mark Sanford encounter. I didn't ask questions or probe him on this idea because it was late, I still had a lot of work left to do before I could leave for the day and he said I couldn't write about his new insight (he has since made it a key talking point in his mea culpa tour).

The idea seemed implausible, at best. Animosity toward Mr. Sanford, which felt like it couldn't get any stronger even before his Argentine vacation, was just one reason the Legislature has been unwilling to go beyond the partial restructuring it approved a decade and a half ago. Primarily, legislators don't want to give the governor the direct control over agencies that other governors take for granted because 1) it's a change, and we don't like change in South Carolina, and 2) anything that makes the governor stronger makes legislators comparatively weaker.

But while we were all distracted by the daily revelations about and increasingly combative responses by our high-flying governor and the insult-yelling congressman and the start of another football season and my new baby kitties (OK, so only I was distracted by that last one), there came from the State House a tiny little glimmer of a possibility of a small bit of governmental reform.

Senate Republican Leader Harvey Peeler, whose serious job is as chairman of the Medical Affairs Committee, announced right before Labor Day that he had put together a special subcommittee to work on three bills that would reconfigure several major health agencies and put the governor in charge of them. This is significant not so much because the bills are the be-all, end-all in the quest to drag our government out of the 19th century, but simply because anything is happening at all.