80% pay raises are just the start of the grift at the SC State House | Opinion
The self-dealing at the South Carolina State House is taking place right before our very eyes, and now only a gubernatorial veto and the possibility of a last-ditch legal challenge can stop a $3 million a year pay raise and giant lifetime pension boosts for the state’s 170 lawmakers.
It could only resemble a robbery more if the 125 members of the General Assembly who voted themselves 80% pay raises wore bandanas over their wide grins while pointing pistols at taxpayers.
Worse, the grift somehow just got worse.
The state Senate slipped raises into the state budget in April with zero public debate. Then a committee of six lawmakers approved it just as quickly and quietly this month, sending the state’s $14.7 billion spending plan to the House and the Senate for up-or-down votes in both chambers.
Those votes came Wednesday. And as a few politicians echoed my criticism about the process, some said Speaker Murrell Smith had told them if they didn’t want the raise, they could donate it to worthy organizations in their district. Just like that, 170 individual slush funds were born, without any formal way to track how each lawmaker might dole out as much as $18,000 a year.
This is what passes for fiscal conservatism at the State House in the year 2025: The Senate voted 37-5 and the House voted 88-25 to boost pay and pad pensions for life for themselves — without any mention that the raises would cause the part-time politicians’ pensions to soar.
Whether the lawmakers actually do give their money to noble causes and document their largesse publicly, or whether they spend it as many insist they will on in-district travel and expenses, or whether they just see it as income, they will be showered with those big pension benefits.
Do they deserve more pay?
There is an argument to make that our state lawmakers should be paid more than the $22,400 in base pay and in-district allotments they currently receive as income. But part-time lawmakers who meet just three days a week for five months for their yearly legislative session shouldn’t have boosted their pay surreptitiously at the end of it, especially after voting against a raise earlier.
The House overwhelmingly rejected the exact same size raise in March. That vote was 91-15.
Do state lawmakers deserve more pay? Probably, to be honest. The last raise was in the 1990s.
And are our part-time lawmakers accountable to constituents all year long? Sure. Demands on lawmakers’ time have only risen over three decades, and better pay means better candidates.
But do state lawmakers owe it to their constituents to practice fiscal responsibility? Damn right.
Yet only a handful of lawmakers showed any restraint or reservations about getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar in consecutive hearings in the Senate and House on Wednesday.
In fact, state Sen. Wes Climer, R-York, was the only person in the 46-member Senate to question the way the raise was slid into the budget and the idea it would take effect so quickly.
“This is a good budget that reflects our priorities as a Legislature and it reflects well on us as legislators working on behalf of our constituents,” Climer said. “But, and there’s a very important but, it has a giant wart on it. In addition to raising pay for teachers and law enforcement, it also raises pay for those of us in this room, and it does so with immediate effect.”
Climer fruitlessly urged the Senate to vote no on its up-or-down budget vote — and send the six-member committee back “just for another minute or two” to remove the raise. He said no raise should take effect until after an election to avoid self-enrichment without voter approval.
And he also threatened a lawsuit against the state to try to block the raise if the budget were ultimately approved and signed into law by the governor with the extra pay intact. Climer said former state Sen. Dick Harpootlian, D-Richland, has agreed to take that case for free.
In a brief phone interview with me, Harpootlian said he’d have more information on Monday.
“Seems like a long shot, but I’m curious to hear what you think,” I texted him after we spoke.
“Happy to talk Monday,” came his reply.
‘Think this thing through’
State Rep. Bruce Bannister, R-Greenville, didn’t even characterize the pay raise as a pay raise.
On Wednesday, the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, which writes the state’s budget each year, argued for passage while touting the many ways it helps South Carolinians, such as setting money aside for rainy day funds to weather economic and literal storms, investing in bridge repair and keeping tuition rates at current levels for in-state college students.
Then he addressed the raises while calling them by another name.
“The expectation is that you will spend that on your constituents, doing the job that they’ve elected you to do and going to the places that they’ve asked you to go,” he said. “It is not a pay raise. It is an expense reimbursement. If you don’t spend the money on your constituents, that is on you.”
State Rep. April Cromer, R-Anderson, who would vote against the budget, quickly set the record straight, telling Bannister that income taxes are taken from that money, meaning it is a pay raise.
State Rep. Joe White, R-Newberry, said he was “angry” about what happened at the General Assembly’s six-member conference committee. “I’m begging you to think this thing through,” he said. “Do you want to run next year on saying, ‘Yeah, I voted myself an $18,000 a year raise?’”
He added that if the General Assembly wanted to consider voting a raise that would become effective after the next election cycle, he had introduced a bill that would accomplish that.
“I don’t think serving people should vote themselves a raise,” he said.
“I think if we’re going to vote a raise, we need to say, ‘for the next group that comes in,’” he went on, and then he skewered the slush funds. “I’ve heard this thing where, ‘I want to donate mine to charity.’ Well, we don’t get to see the books, do we? We don’t know whether you will or not.”
State Rep. Kathy Landing, R-Charleston, a second-term lawmaker and a financial adviser her entire adult life, said it was “very upsetting” that the House had voted down a raise in March — “summarily” with “a very high majority” — and that it resurfaced at the last minute in the budget.
““Our input was there,” she said. “We voted. And somehow, somehow the Senate was able to prevail over the House in terms of what the result was. Now they would say, ‘No, we came to an agreement.’ And maybe they did. But at least the way a lot of us understand it is they said we will not pass a budget unless we have this raise. For me, that’s a non-starter. Because if we do in fact deserve a raise, first of all our voters are going to let us know.”
She added, “When you go to give yourself a pay raise, it shouldn’t be a last-minute situation and it shouldn’t be one that didn’t have any kind of public hearing or any kind of input from the public.”
‘A major loss of trust’
Landing said she wanted it on record that she would “turn down” the district money and that while others might use it for “charitable giving,” she and her husband “do that with our money, not with taxpayer money.”
She summarized her perspective, saying, “I think we should have a budget passed, but I think we need to think hard about how we do things because for me, this whole episode has caused a major loss of trust. And when you lose trust, that’s a really tough place to be.”
State Rep. Brandon Guffey, R-York, is one of the lawmakers with plans to give the additional money to organizations in his community. He listed a number of them at Wednesday’s hearing while making the point that he wouldn’t vote “against a great budget just because of” the raise.
Guffey listed organizations from SAVE for suicide awareness to Hungry Heroes, which feeds first responders, veterans and members of law enforcement as well as groups like the Palmetto Women’s Center, Operation Lightshine and the National Center on Sexual Online Explotiation.
Likewise, state Rep. James Teeple, R-Charleston, listed the groups he would give to.
Teeple said he has donated his salary to two causes before and would do so with the raise, to St. Jude St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which he said saved his daughter’s life, and Camp Firefly, which is a camp for terminally ill children.
“I know that we’re underpaid, and it’s a loss to come up here and all the sacrifices and time away from your family,” he said. “One of the hardest things for myself is I don’t get to put my kids to bed three to four nights a week when we’re in session, and I’ve got to be honest with you. That hurts, but it’s a sacrifice. It’s service, but that’s what we’re here for.”
That’s right. Working in politics comes with an element of sacrifice. It’s for public service, not private enrichment. Politicians are there to make things better for others, not themselves. If they believe that requires more money for themselves, they should make the case and not do what they’ve done so scurrilously here. They should also not support slush funds that could so easily be abused.
This is what their re-election campaigns should be about.
Gov. Henry McMaster should veto this raise and secret pension padding and require lawmakers to discuss — in public — how much of the public’s money they deserve, what’s reasonable for travel to Columbia and constituent services, and the exact effect of a raise on a pension system whose proper funding is so vital to hundreds of thousands of past and present state workers.
Otherwise, he’s an accomplice, an accessory to the robbery I’d like to report at the State House, 1100 Gervais St.