Wednesday, Apr. 23, 2008

Living in a perpetual state of settling

“DUM SPIRO spero,” Finance Chairman Hugh Leatherman greeted me when I dropped by the Senate last week.

“Me too,” I answered.

While I breathe, I hope.

For all their shortcomings, our founders demonstrated impressive foresight when they chose our state motto.

If not for our hope that things would improve, we’d all melt into a puddle of despair.

If it weren’t seared into my memory, I’d think our motto was actually: “We can’t expect better, and we shouldn’t be so audacious as to hope for it. Take what we can get, and be thankful things aren’t even worse. Settle.”

OK, so that’s too long to fit on a seal. But spend much time following public policy debates, and it’s hard to miss how deeply ingrained the “settle” mentality is.

Consider just two examples, from Mr. Leatherman’s recent budget doings:

• The least-discussed effect of a revenue shortfall in the current fiscal year was a $30 million mid-year budget cut for public schools.

Most people don’t even realize there were any mid-year cuts, which in itself is astounding since those are the bogeymen of bad budgeting, the potentialities that strike fear in the hearts of the bravest of bureaucrats. It’s all the more extraordinary when you recall how aggressively school officials have always fought against any threats to school funding.

Not a whimper this time, even though schools and schools alone took the hit. The rest of government was shielded from mid-year cuts thanks to a reserve fund, but Education Improvement Act funding has no such protection.

When I asked school officials and supporters why there was no outrage, they said they didn’t feel like they could complain about a $30 million hit — a small dent in the $3 billion state education budget — since lawmakers aren’t forcing them to take the same across-the-board cuts as everybody else next year. With only $90 million in “new money” projected for next year, most state agencies will have to make do with less money than this year so that the schools can receive $149 million more than this year.

Mind you, schools aren’t being spared from next year’s across-the-board cuts in order to make up for this mid-year cut. They were being spared before anyone knew about a mid-year cut. They’re being spared because the overwhelming majority of legislators understand that there is no better investment in our state’s future than educating the next generation. Up to a point, anyhow.

• The biggest outrage of the budget year had less to do with money than with abuse of power of the banana-republic sort. Mr. Leatherman and the Senate’s other top leader, President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell, inserted a proviso in the budget requiring the Supreme Court to take money out of its own budget to pay the fees that the court had ordered in a ruling that went against the Legislature.

S.C. Chief Justice Jean Toal told State reporter John O’Connor that this was an unconstitutional attempt to punish the court for its ruling, but she backed off after the good senators agreed to remove the proviso.

In response to our editorial denouncing this attack on judicial independence and the rule of law and calling on Sens. Leatherman and McConnell and others to apologize to the court and the public, Mrs. Toal sent us a guest column defending those senators.

They’ve always been so gracious and willing to listen to my point of view, she wrote; we have a frank and open relationship, and that is a good thing.

A colleague likened reading the column to watching a hostage video. I didn’t see a gun pointed at Mrs. Toal’s head, but I couldn’t help thinking of the Stockholm Syndrome.

Not that I blame Mrs. Toal, who has played a huge role in shaking off the court’s historic status as handmaiden to the Legislature. It’s always wrong to blame the victim.

The problem is that Mrs. Toal, like the public school community, like most of us, has come to accept the status quo of the Legislative State — a state in which the Legislature acts as the government, rather than as one of three co-equal branches of that government, and so doesn’t give a second thought to bullying the other branches.

A state run by committee, without the counterbalancing force of a leader, where the best and boldest ideas always, always get compromised down by the worst and most timid, and the tough decisions just don’t get made.

Living in this state wears you down, makes you think that the abnormal is normal, makes you forget that this isn’t the way they do things anywhere else.

With those memories wiped out — or never formed to begin with — even the strongest among us come to believe that, well, yes, it’s OK for the Legislature to slide on a commitment to the schools because, gee, things could be so much worse. It makes us believe it’s OK for powerful legislators to fire a shot across the bow of the Supreme Court, to force the chief justice to trot hat-in-hand over to the State House to explain why the court had dared to do its duty and strike down a clearly unconstitutional law — and to be grateful for the opportunity to do that.

I breathe. I hope.

I breathe. I hope.

Hope we’ll get over our low expectations.

Hope we’ll stop settling.

Hope we’ll start believing we deserve better.

And start demanding better.

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