Thursday, Nov. 20, 2008

Scoppe: Nikki vs. the speaker

POLITICS CAN be a brutal sport, but we in South Carolina rarely see the type of retribution that Lexington Rep. Nikki Haley says she’s experiencing because of her campaign to force the Legislature to take recorded votes on all bills.

House leaders say she’s seeing plots where none exist, and some have suggested that her vision is deliberately skewed — the better to make herself a victim to advance statewide political ambitions.

At issue is a proposal floated this month at a House Republican Caucus meeting to let the speaker appoint committee chairmen, rather than having them elected by committee members; it could come up for a vote in the full House during the Dec. 2 organizational session. Ms. Haley charges that Speaker Bobby Harrell wants the change because he’s “very angry with me” over her recorded-voting campaign and this is the only way he can stop her from being elected to chair the powerful Labor, Commerce and Industry Committee.

Ms. Haley, a third-term legislator who has risen rapidly in no small part because Mr. Harrell has given her key appointments, told me she’s disappointed but not surprised by the proposal, which was sold to caucus members as a way to keep Democrats from wielding too much influence in the majority-Republican House.

“I approached leadership about on-the-record voting, and I was warned not to pursue the legislation and told we don’t need that, we don’t want to go there, it’s not necessary,” she said. “I chose to pursue it anyway. After that, it was made very clear to me by leadership in no uncertain terms that the speaker was not going to let me have that chairmanship.”

She acknowledges she burned some bridges when she accepted offers of support from Gov. Mark Sanford, No. 1 persona non grata among legislators, and the S.C. Policy Council, a traditional ally of House leaders that is peddling a study that makes it looks like the House does even more of the state’s business by unrecorded voice votes than it actually does.

Mr. Harrell disputes pretty much everything Ms. Haley says, except the part about the reaction to the day she spent flying around the state for news conferences with Mr. Sanford and the Policy Council. He says he is not pushing the rule change, although he thinks it’s more efficient than the current system. He says Ms. Haley doesn’t have the votes to be elected committee chair “under any scenario, and so that statement doesn’t make sense.”

“For someone to believe that a rule change is all about them speaks more about that person than it does about the rules change,” he told me.

Added Lexington Rep. Kenny Bingham, who as caucus leader-in-waiting is one of the people selling the rule change: “If the speaker wants to enact revenge on somebody, he’s got the power to do that right now. He doesn’t put you on the committee.”

In fact, Mr. Bingham argues that letting the speaker select committee chairs (he already appoints the committee members) is “effectively saying, ‘This is the process, we’re going to be open about how it works.’ We think it brings accountability to it.”

It’s a good argument, unless you believe, as Ms. Haley does, that Mr. Harrell wants to keep his fingerprints off any retaliation.

Ms. Haley concedes that the rule change isn’t “totally just about me” — and that worries her even more: She says it will send a clear message to the largest group of new representatives in 18 years that they will be punished if they don’t fall in line. That possibility is what convinced her to take the extraordinary step of making her claims public.

“The one thing I want out of this is that if someone feels like something is wrong, they should be able to speak up and say it without any loss of opportunity or any punishment,” she said. “What I’ve found myself in was the dilemma of choosing between going forward with this proposal for on-the-record voting or trying to weigh the consequences of going for a leadership position where you think you could be more valuable. It’s a very slippery slope, because you’ve got to be able to sleep with yourself at night.”

For the record, Ms. Haley says she is not running for statewide office, she does not believe she’s being picked on because she’s a woman and she does not see herself as a victim — all charges that were leveled against her when she asked the Republican Caucus to endorse her bill. “They’re making every excuse in the book as to why I’m doing this, and why can’t it be just because I think it’s good policy?”

“Anything you want to do that’s basically advancing the state, you’re told to sit down and be quiet. I’m a big girl, and politically I will handle it. But it’s sad, the direction that government is starting to go in, when the way we need to be going is toward trust and honesty and transparency.”

Mr. Harrell, who says he and most House members support more recorded votes, just not necessarily through her bill, blames Ms. Haley’s attitude for her problems. “I can tell you that the membership generally has been pretty angry with her,” he said. “I hear a lot of concerns about how some members are out there saying that most of the House doesn’t want transparency or most of the House doesn’t want to be fiscally responsible. I think in a legislative body when you start singling yourself out as one of two or three people who want to do the right thing and the rest of them do not, it creates some animosity.”

It’s anyone’s guess how this battle plays out. As Ms. Haley puts it: “This is going to go down as a lesson either of how one person made a difference — or what not to do.”

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

Get The State newspaper delivered to your home. Click here to subscribe.