Ban trans athletes? Block federal gun laws? More than money is at stake in SC budget
For several hours on Wednesday and Thursday, state senators found themselves in a debate over whether someone born male but who identifies as female could play on a middle- or high-school girls’ sports team.
In other exchanges, senators clashed over whether to offer people money to encourage them to be vaccinated, and approved a proposal to block state and local law enforcement from seizing firearms under federal gun regulations based on the classification of the weapon.
What do the debates have in common?
They all took place during the S.C. Senate’s three-day debate over a very important piece of legislation on a very different topic: the state’s $10.6 billion spending plan, in which lawmakers decide how much money public schools, state employee salaries, state agencies and local governments will get from state taxpayers.
The moments were among several times the budget debate morphed into a discussion on social issues that may help lawmakers with their reelection pitches.
But the budget bill is also a place where lawmakers can tuck in provisos, one year law changes, in hopes they’ll stick in the future, effectively circumventing the normal and much more deliberative process for getting a bill passed.
With the Senate’s final approval last Thursday, the House and Senate have now passed versions of a spending plan for the 2021-22 fiscal year, which begins July 1. The budget now goes back to the House where budget writers plan to take another swing through the budget writing process.
Here’s a look at the proposals S.C. senators tried to tuck in the state budget:
A ban on transgender athletes
For several hours over two days of the debate, senators argued over whether transgender middle- and high-school athletes could participate on teams that do not correspond to their gender on their birth certificate.
Similar efforts in the House failed to get passed committee this year, and the NCAA has said it would not hold championship tournaments in states with such laws on the books.
Sen. Richard Cash, R-Anderson, pushed for the amendment saying it would protect women athletes.
“The idea is it’s not fair for a young woman to compete against a young man who is identifying himself as a woman,” Cash said. “Men have distinct documented and well known advantages over women when it comes to things like foot speed and how high you can jump, and muscular structure.”
Democrats fought against the proposed proviso, a one-year law attached to the state’s annual spending plan.
Senate Minority Leader Brad Hutto, D-Orangeburg, said having a transgender ban in place would lead to the NCAA pulling championship tournaments, which would mean places such as Greenville with scheduled tournaments would lose out on tourism dollars.
“We learned this lesson ... when the bathroom bill came up,” Hutto said, referring to a bill that would have barred transgender people from using public bathrooms — including in public schools — that do not match the gender they were assigned at birth. “Not only did we learn the lesson, we aced the test,” he added.
The so-called “bathroom bill” never made it out of committee.
This year, Cash, while he waited for his own transgender athletes bill to be scheduled for a Senate committee hearing, used the budget to force the discussion.
And even Senate Finance Chairman Hugh Leatherman said the Cash amendment had nothing to do with state spending.
“We are trying to put things in that have no place in this appropriation bill,” Leatherman said.
But after several hours of debate on the Senate floor, several failed Democratic attempts to kill the proviso, and private discussions among senators, Cash withdrew the amendment.
“I am certainly willing for this issue to go through that (committee) process, and I think that’s going to be happening very shortly,” Cash said.
An Education subcommittee hearing on Cash’s bill is scheduled for Thursday.
State money for Planned Parenthood
Cash was successful in pushing forward one of his other priorities.
The Senate adopted an amendment to keep state money from going to Planned Parenthood.
The only public money Planned Parenthood receives is through Medicaid, said Molly Rivera, the communications director for Planned Parenthood South Atlantic. Through fees for services, Medicaid pays for sexual and reproductive health care such as breast exams, sexually transmitted infection screenings, cervical cancer screenings and other primary care services.
“This is just a political ploy to score some points,” Rivera said.
Medicaid cannot be used to pay for abortions in South Carolina except when the procedure is done to save a woman’s life or when a pregnancy is due to rape or incest, extremely rare occurrences, according to the S.C. Hospital Association.
Cash’s proposal, which was adopted, prevents money appropriated for family planning to directly or indirectly subsidize abortion services or administrative services.
Planned Parenthood receives Medicaid reimbursements to provide low income people with family planning services such as birth control or family planning education.
“From our point of view, Cash’s amendment could affect this other group of folks who are not in the regular Medicaid program but do qualify for this family planning program, and could take away their access to birth control from Planned Parenthood,” Rivera said.
Senators included a caveat. The proviso gets nullified if the federal government says it will stops sending Medicaid funding to South Carolina because of the provision and possibly affecting hospitals.
The S.C. Department of Health and Human Services said on Monday if the federal government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the proviso fell within federal rules, then Planned Parenthood would stop receiving Medicaid reimbursements.
The state budget does not have a specific line item dedicated to family planning services or Planned Parenthood, but the state does set aside money to use to match federal Medicaid dollars.
Instead, Planned Parenthood bills the state-federal insurance program for services provided to patients. In 2018, Gov. Henry McMaster tried to withhold Medicaid dollars from Planned Parenthood, but a federal court order stopped that effort.
Cash’s proposal is an effort to do the same.
“I don’t want to be giving any money to a business whose main business is killing unborn babies,” Cash said.
Cash for proof of COVID vaccine?
Senators, who are against requirements for people to take the COVID-19 vaccine, debated whether the state should offer some financial encouragement.
Two proposals were made to offer money in some form to take get the vaccine as the state struggles with vaccine hesitancy.
One proposal from Hutto called for giving $100 to the first 500,000 people who complete a COVID-19 vaccination after July 1, when the fiscal year begins.
“The way we’re going to deal with this pandemic is to get to herd immunity,” Hutto said.
Another proposal from state Sen. Darrell Jackson, D-Richland would have awarded any student at state colleges or universities who completed a COVID-19 vaccination to receive a $250 scholarship.
“No mandates, these are just incentives,” Jackson said.
But both ideas were shot down in the Republican dominated Senate.
The Dodo bird
The last proposal senators discussed was offered by state Sen. Dick Harpootlian, D-Richland, to make a broader point about the chamber focusing on the task at hand.
The proposed amendment: making the Dodo the state bird.
“If you’ve got issues like abortion, guns, reparations, whatever, can we do it some other week or days when we’re trying to get this budget through, or we’re going to end up like the Dodo bird, extinct, politically extinct,” Harpootlian said. “People aren’t going to put up with this.”
Lawmakers took it as jest.
“Can you explain this with a straight face?” Leatherman said on the Senate floor.
Harpootlian withdrew the amendment.
This story was originally published May 4, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
