SC Attorney General calls for state Supreme Court to rule on USC mask rule

South Carolina’s top prosecutor has asked the state’s top court to rule on whether the University of South Carolina is allowed to require masks inside campus buildings.

The Wednesday filing from S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson to the state Supreme Court agrees with an earlier filing from a USC professor and state Sen. Dick Harpootlian, D-Richland, calling for the court to intervene on the issue.

The question is whether a proviso — a one-year law written into the state budget — prevents USC from requiring masks on campus. Attorney General Alan Wilson, citing a proviso sponsor, has argued the legislative intent of the proviso was to prevent mask mandates. Others, such as Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, have argued that is not what the legislature intended.

“We agree with this court’s acceptance of this case,” Wilson said in the court filing. “The will of the General Assembly in enacting (the proviso) must be carried out. In our view, that will was to ban mask mandates at state-supported colleges and universities.”

Wilson’s filing agreed with Harpootlian’s filing that the court should hear the case without it going through lower courts first (a practice called original jurisdiction) and that the court should expedite the ruling because it is in the public interest.

Wilson acknowledged the filing was ambiguous, but stuck beside his previous interpretations of the legislative intent.

“We readily acknowledge that there is a reasonable alternative interpretation of the proviso, if read in isolation. However, it is very poorly written,” Wilson said in the court filing.

The filing follows a public back-and-forth that involved Harpootlian, whose Senate district includes USC; the Senate majority leader; the state attorney general; the mayor of Columbia; a USC professor and even the state Supreme Court.

While the argument has played out in courts and in news outlets, the number of COVID-19 cases has been increasing throughout the state.

When lawmakers were approving the state’s budget earlier this year, it looked like COVID-19 was on its way out. In June 2021, the number of new cases per day had dropped to double digits, according to the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control. Since the end of July, S.C. has been racking up more than 1,000 new cases per day.