Sunday, May. 17, 2009

Scoppe: How Mark Sanford changed the budget debate, for the worse

THE STATE budget bill that lawmakers sent to the governor last week never was going to be pretty, not in a year when state tax collections came up $1 billion short and aren’t projected to recover in the coming year. But it’s much uglier than it had to be, and it was created through a process that was much uglier than usual.

It includes, as Gov. Mark Sanford and his allies have noted, several items that are at best far less essential than the teachers who will be laid off and the prison guards who won’t be hired and the staff that won’t be provided to help our courts operate smoothly.

It actually blocks some cuts that agencies had determined they could make without jeopardizing their missions.

It ignores virtually all of the good ideas the governor has put forward for saving money (though not much as he projects) through agency consolidations and other efficiency measures.

And there is no justification for the secret way the final version was put together, with Senate Finance Chairman Hugh Leatherman and House Ways and Means Chairman Dan Cooper (certainly with Speaker Bobby Harrell’s blessing if not active involvement) reaching their own private agreement over a long weekend on how to change the just-passed Senate bill, and presenting their 550-page version of that new budget to House members on Tuesday for a vote within hours, followed by a final Senate vote the following day. This left no time for legislators to review the document and understand what it did and didn’t contain, let alone for any sort of public input.

In normal years, that combination of abuses of substance and process would have drawn a near-universal cry of condemnation from editorial writers across the state. We would have skewered the Legislature for unwise spending and shutting the public out of the process. We would have argued that even though the badly spent money made up only a tiny, tiny fraction of the budget, it was more important than ever this year that every single dollar be put to its best use.

But Mark Sanford took all those objections off the table. Made them irrelevant, or at least so relatively insignificant as to not be worth our energy or ink. By clinging to his anti-pragmatic, effects-be-damned position that our state will not accept its share of federal stimulus funds unless they are used to not stimulate the economy, he shifted the political debate from “How will the Legislature cut spending?” to “Will the Legislature be able to bypass the governor?”

Much as reviving an economy in a tailspin takes precedence over paying down long-term debt, making sure our state gets the federal money that state taxpayers will have to pay for even if it instead goes to California takes precedence over nit-picking legislative spending decisions — the bad ones of which total far less than the $350 million the governor wants only on his terms.

For all the governor’s harping over bad legislative decision-making, Mr. Sanford’s anti-stimulus media blitz has given the Legislature a pass — and virtually eliminated any chance of getting those “reforms” he wants.

It reminds me of what he’s done to the public education debate: By denying the progress our schools are making, grossly exaggerating their failures and bringing in a secretive libertarian, shutter-the-schools money machine — complete with outrageous campaign donations and incessant, dishonest, over-the-top claims against legislators who dare to oppose its efforts to pay parents to take their kids out of public schools — he has virtually shut down the nascent efforts to make real improvements in the public schools. He has made those of us who had been working for years to correct the very real problems in our schools almost afraid to talk about them, because we know our words will be twisted in an attempt to bolster the assault on public schools.

Ah, you say, but the Legislature wasn’t willing to make smart spending decisions in the past, when the governor wasn’t playing chicken with federal funds and the conversation actually was about smart spending and responsible budget-writing.

True enough. But there’s no reason to believe, as Mr. Sanford declares, that “Taking all the stimulus money forestalls reforms that in many cases are long overdue in South Carolina.” The Legislature simply is not going to be bullied into making the structural changes Mr. Sanford wants — most of which it should make.

There was, however, a possibility that lawmakers might have worked harder to ferret out the wasteful spending that remains in the budget, that they might have accepted some of his efficiency ideas, that they might not have retaliated against his agencies’ efforts to target their spending cuts, and that they might have had an open budget debate, where lawmakers at least had the opportunity to review what they were voting on before they voted on it. But through his brinkmanship, Mr. Sanford ensured none of that would happen.

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

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