SC Republican 2020 wins expanded power in the State House. What changes are coming now?
Republicans now overwhelmingly control the South Carolina Legislature, a majority hold over spending and policy that expanded after the 2020 presidential election when voters helped flip five State House seats in the GOP’s favor.
To show for it, Republican lawmakers in the past two years have sent the governor a slew of conservative-leaning legislation that started with a law — now on hold — to ban abortions at about the six-week mark and let licensed gun owners carry openly in public.
But the Republican Party’s tighter grip over the General Assembly is hardly the only major change that has shaken the second floor of the South Carolina Capitol.
In the past seven months, new leadership has arisen in the Senate following the death of one of the upper chamber’s longest-serving and most powerful legislators, Hugh Leatherman. The House will soon go through the a similar shakeup after two top Republican leaders — House Speaker Jay Lucas, R-Darlington, and House Majority Leader Gary Simrill, R-York — declined to seek reelection in November, creating a domino effect that’ll give one lawmaker more influence.
That, tacked onto the Legislature’s redraw of political maps that, in some cases, pitted incumbents against one another, and a rebirth in many ways of a conservative faction of lawmakers who now see an open door to slice government spending could mean one of the largest shifts the Legislature has gone through in years.
SC GOP expands power, as factions start to splinter off
Republicans had what leaders and political watchers could argue were two of the most successful legislative years.
Fresh off 2020, when Republicans flipped two seats in the House and a whopping three in the Senate — taking out a two-time gubernatorial candidate who chaired the Senate’s education finance panel — Republican lawmakers wasted no time advancing legislation popular within the voter base.
Out of the gate, and with the backing of Gov. Henry McMaster, they passed a six-week “fetal heartbeat” abortion ban, now stuck in the courts. They also permitted licensed gun owners to carry openly in public. A separate permitless, or constitutional carry, gun bill passed the House but was never adopted by the Senate.
They then successfully pushed an effort to restart executions in the state, on hold since 2011 due to a lack of lethal injection drugs, by making the state’s electric chair the default method while also adding a newly-installed firing squad.
And, this year with the House facing primary elections, the lower chamber moved fast to pass tax cut and two election-related proposals and pushed out legislation that dealt with critical race theory, abortions and transgender athletes. The Senate has, for example, adopted legislation that aims to expand parents’ choice of where their child can go to school, split the state’s health and environmental agency and, after seven years, legalize certain forms of marijuana for South Carolinians who suffer from serious symptoms and debilitating diseases.
That success hasn’t come without clear intraparty growing pains.
Look no further than this past week, when more than a dozen conservative Republican lawmakers and U.S. House Rep. Ralph Norman, R-Rock Hill, stood in the State House lobby to announce the formation of the South Carolina House Freedom Caucus, an offshoot of a national group that leaders say they are trying to copy cat in legislatures across the country.
Standing with them? Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff and former U.S. House Rep. Mark Meadows, a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, who called the state legislators behind him Wednesday the ones “willing to stand up for those forgotten men and women who’ve said enough is enough.”
“You don’t have to be the chair of a committee in order to get legislation passed, that’s something that a lot of people around here seem to struggle to understand,” said caucus leader Rep. Adam Morgan, R-Greenville, who said the group will seek to “change the culture specifically of this place.”
“Every member can have say and influence, especially when you get to the floor,” Morgan added. “... Obviously we want members to be in positions of influence. We’ll fully be able to operate wherever we are and be able to get our conservative agenda passed.”
Pressed to further explain what legislation the group planned to prioritize next session, freshman state Rep. RJ May, R-Lexington — who said the House “failed” to transform state government and defend conservative values — said the group wants to see an outright ban on abortions, constitutional carry and the elimination of the income tax.
Mainly, May said, they want to cut government spending and plan to focus their energy on the state budget.
“I hear people talk about let’s pay teachers, law enforcement, good roads. Those things are important to the citizenry of our state. Health care. You don’t hear talked a lot about, but it is a huge chunk of what we have within the confines of our budget for our state,” outgoing House GOP Leader Simrill told The State newspaper in response to the group’s formation, asking how the caucus planned to achieve its spending goals if it wants to cut, for instance, state income taxes, which most taxpayers don’t pay.
“In order for government to work, consensus has to be built,” Simrill said. “And so I think about congressmen from Washington coming to South Carolina; Congress at best is atrophy, at worst is gridlock. To come and tell South Carolina how to govern?”
Political redraw of maps to shift power in SC
South Carolina’s new voting maps also will have seismic implications for voters over the next decade.
McMaster last year signed off on new voting maps for the state House, Senate and U.S. House that eliminates, in part, seats in Richland County — where the State House is located — shifting those seats to faster-growing areas around the coast and makes a Lowcountry congressional seat more red ahead of the 2022 November elections.
Lawmakers were criticized for drawing maps that sought to protect incumbents and shift the state’s political makeup in Republican favor. But legislators have countered the maps had to account for fast-growing areas around the South Carolina-North Carolina border and coast, where populations have ballooned over the past decade.
“Incumbent locations were considered,” Florence Republican Rep. Jay Jordan, who chaired the House’s redistricting committee, said in December. “But lines were not contorted in order to protect incumbent legislators. I can say that very, very clearly.”
Though the maps are now part of a court battle, the state is moving through the 2022 elections under the new redraw that’ll include one merged House district in Richland County that has pitted two incumbents — Democratic state Reps. Wendy Brawley and Jermaine Johnson — against each other. And it includes a U.S. House map that has turned the 1st Congressional District currently represented by Rep. Nancy Mace, R-Daniel Island, a bit more red.
“I think the lack of a cohesive strategy by Democrats in the Senate and in the House really proved to be an Achilles heel as it proved to be redistricting,” said Trav Robertson, chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party. “Republicans took full advantage of it. As a result, Republican primaries are going to determine who controls the House and Senate over the next decade.”
Drew McKissick, the chairman of the state Republican Party, told The State recently he wouldn’t be surprised if another five to six seats flipped for Republicans in the State House in 2022.
“It’s a long time between now and November, things can change,” McKissick acknowledged, but said the current political environment does not put that potential “outside (the) realm of possibility.”
SC senator over spending dies, sparking leadership change
The Senate after the death of Leatherman has undergone one of the more serious leadership changes in decades, enabling other senators to grow in power.
Leatherman, who ran the powerful Senate Finance Committee for two decades and served in the Senate for four decades, died in November at age 90. Apart from the budget, his fingerprints are all over some of the state’s largest economic development deals that include the construction of Boeing in North Charleston and the Port of Charleston.
A terminal at the port is named after him.
Leatherman’s death resulted in expanded power for Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, an Edgefield Republican who did not change titles. But he has in recent months been able to exercise broad influence over the chamber’s priorities by using what’s known as a “special order” procedure, bumping bills up to the No. 1 debate slot.
The ripple effect in the Senate that runs on seniority also resulted in Sen. Harvey Peeler, R-Cherokee, becoming chairman of the finance committee, giving him spending power, and Thomas Alexander, R-Oconee, becoming the president.
At the helm of the budget, Peeler pushed his colleagues this year to agree to a $1 billion tax cut and a $1 billion one-time rebate that is at odds with House spending and potentially setting up a long negotiation between the two chambers.
“You can’t out tax cut Harvey Peeler, so let’s get down to the negotiation table,” Peeler told the Associated Press in February after the Senate passed his tax cut proposal.
Top House leaders leaving, boosting 1 lawmaker’s name ID
House Budget Chairman Murrell Smith, R-Sumter, is slated to become the next House speaker in the coming days.
His rise to the purple robe and gavel comes after two of the top Republican leaders in the lower chamber declined to run for reelection in 2022. House Republican Leader Simrill, who owns and runs a high-end used car business, announced in March his plans to retire after serving 30 years. And House Speaker Lucas, an attorney, followed suit, saying he will step down from his powerful role.
Neither have said what their career plans are after they leave the House.
The House will hold an election for speaker this coming Thursday, after Lucas submitted his resignation effective 5 p.m. May 12 — sine die, or the final day of the legislative year. That means Smith, likeliest to become the next speaker, will formally assume the role starting at 5:01 p.m.
Smith will serve as speaker until the chamber meets again in December for its reorganizational session, where new lawmakers will be sworn in to office, legislators will find out their committee assignments and where the House will likely reelect Smith.
Becoming speaker now rather than after the November elections will give Smith an opportunity for a smooth transition period, Simrill said, as opposed to moving into the role in an abrupt change.
To become speaker, Smith will have to step down as chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. He assumed that role in 2018, after Lucas ousted his predecessor.
“There are issues that happen all throughout the summer months, the fall months,” Simrill said. “This gives an opportunity for Mr. Smith to be the speaker, not just the speaker in waiting through that period and then he would be the speaker coming into the next session.”
