Editorial: SC Legislature still must reform education, ethics, find a roads fix

SCHOOLS THAT aren’t teaching kids what they need to know to get good jobs and help our state prosper.

Legislators who don’t have to tell us who’s footing their bills — or whose interests they’re protecting when they pass bills — and who get to decide for themselves whether they are complying with ethics laws.

Roads pocked by potholes that swallow up our cars, a piece at a time, while road decisions are made by vote-swapping boards that by design have a parochial perspective.

These are the problems that everyone agreed our Legislature had to fix this year. They are the problems our legislators promised us they would fix this year.

But nearly two-thirds through the 2015 General Assembly, with legislators set to return from their Easter break on Tuesday to begin the final, frantic stretch of the session, there are no fixes in sight.

Legislators might expand some reading, pre-K or other education programs, and that could well pay off, but there’s no indication that they will undertake any of the governmental or educational reforms that we need to help fix what the Supreme Court determined was an unconstitutional failure to provide all children a decent education. Instead, legislative leaders have punted reforms to next year. At best.

The House has passed legislation that requires elected officials to tell us where they get their income, gives regulators more tools to enforce the ethics law and lets an independent body investigate legislators. But reformers in the Senate killed their own bill after a majority of senators bastardized it with an amendment that let legislators serve on a panel that would investigate legislators.

The roads impasse is even more daunting. The Senate is pursuing a much larger tax increase than the House, and President Pro Tem Hugh Leatherman is adamantly opposed to the reform measures that are among Speaker Jay Lucas’ top priorities. But those differences could be resolved. The problem is that rather than simply opposing a tax increase to pay for the $1 billion or so a year we need to make our roads safe, Gov. Nikki Haley now says she will veto any plan to fix our roads that doesn’t slash taxes by more than $1 billion a year. Seriously. And a mere third of either body can sustain a veto.

The inability of the Legislature to get any traction on any of these items would be bad enough if these were the only big problems facing our state. They are not. They are simply the ones that most insiders agreed to put at the top of the list.

We also need our legislators to overhaul a tax system that is more loophole than whole, streamline a mangled mass of independent state agencies and give governors more control over them, reform a judicial-selection system that leaves judges beholden to legislators and a grand-jury system that gives judges too much authority over criminal investigations, fix a child-protection system that fails to protect children and a domestic-violence law that fails to protect women from domestic violence, and free cities and counties from the central-government shackles in which the Legislature keeps them bound.

And the clock is ticking: Twelve weeks down; eight to go.

This story was originally published April 11, 2015 at 5:00 PM with the headline "Editorial: SC Legislature still must reform education, ethics, find a roads fix."