Editorial: Bad as it is, SC anti-refugee bill represents far worse

THE SENATE HAS done worse than order SLED to keep track of refugees and hold churches at least theoretically liable for any crimes refugees commit. Much worse.

So we might not even comment on the offensive bill the Senate passed last month but for this: It’s part of a disturbing pattern, and unless we do something about it, it’s only going to get worse.

What’s even worse than the bill itself — which was stripped of its must outrageous provisions — is what it represents: the latest effort to kick aside any pretense of writing laws in the best interest of our state and instead throw red meat at legislators’ political base. The latest effort not to act like leaders — people who calm irrational fears — but to play the demagogues who fan the flames, or set them to begin with. It comes on the heels of legislative proposals to nullify Obamacare, to nullify same-sex marriages, to nullify federal gun laws and too many other distractions to name.

It would be bad enough for our legislators to waste time and potentially money on these efforts of dubious constitutionality that have nothing to do with running the state if they already had done the jobs we hired them to do — fix our roads, reform our ethics laws, provide a decent education to all children in South Carolina, to name but a few things they don’t seem to be able to get done. Or if their demagoguery didn’t run out the clock on all of those important tasks. But they haven’t, and it does.

The refugee bill as originally introduced barred the state from spending any money on families fleeing persecution in Syria. That would start with not allowing children who are in this country legally to attend our schools. It would escalate to … what? No police response when they’re assaulted? The original bill made those assaults highly likely, by putting the refugees’ names on a public registry, much like the sex-offender registry, so everyone would know where they live.

The bill that passed merely requires the Department of Social Services to collect information about refugees and pass it on to SLED. It also contains a probably unenforceable provision that says if a refugee commits a violent crime, the victims can sue the refugee’s sponsoring organization.

Anyone who thinks this legislation would make us one bit safer from terrorism is delusional. If safety were our goal, it would be more productive to round up angry white men, since they keep shooting up schools and churches and workplaces. But no reasonable person would suggest that, because the overwhelming majority of angry white men are not dangerous. Just like the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not dangerous. Just like the overwhelming majority of refugees — and probably all the refugees who make it through the United Nations/State Department/Immigration Services/Homeland Security multi-year screening process to get into the United States — are not dangerous.

What this bill represents is our refusal to accept the fact that it is the federal government — not the state government — that determines who can and cannot be in this country legally. We might not like its decisions, just like we may not like the federal government’s decisions about Obamacare or same-sex marriage or gun laws, but on the question of immigration the Constitution could not be more clear about who gets to make those decisions. The only way to get around that is to secede, and that didn’t work out so well the last time we tried it.

It’s not an accident that we’re seeing more and more bills like this consuming our Legislature’s time, and it’s not simply because we’ve elected a handful of tinfoil-hat Republicans. They could be contained if the rational and reasonable Republicans wanted to contain them. Or rather, if the rational Republicans weren’t afraid to contain them.

The problem is that as our state has become increasingly lopsided, with fewer and fewer districts where it’s possible for a good Republican or a good Democrat to win in November, the only thing Republicans dare think about is surviving a Republican primary. And as we saw in February, most Republicans in our state don’t even vote in Republican primaries; they leave that to the extremists.

Short term, the House needs to do … nothing. It needs to ignore this bill, and let it die. Long term, the mainstream voters — the majority of voters in this state — need to stop letting the extremists control the primaries. That won’t change the fact that elections are decided in the primaries rather than the general election. But we certainly can help the rational Republicans survive the primaries — and fight the sort of nonsense that this anti-refugee legislation represents.

This story was originally published April 13, 2016 at 5:00 PM with the headline "Editorial: Bad as it is, SC anti-refugee bill represents far worse."