Scoppe: You don’t have to belong to the SC Freedom Caucus to introduce ridiculous bills
Story Date: 1/13/2025

Scoppe: You don’t have to belong to the SC Freedom Caucus to introduce ridiculous bills
By Cindi Ross Scoppe
Jan 11, 2025 
 
We all know what happens when there’s a bad wreck on the other side of the interstate: Everybody slows down to get a good gander, there's rubbernecking, and inevitably there's another wreck.

I try really hard not to look, and usually I succeed. But sometimes I’m just as guilty as everybody else.

The same is true with the remarkably bad bills our legislators introduce — or at least the ones that thankfully don’t have a prayer of becoming law. By bad I don’t mean simply that I disagree with them; I disagree with probably half the bills that get filed, by both Republicans and Democrats. I mean they’re breathtakingly self-serving or clearly unconstitutional or just jaw-dropping fringy.

When I was reviewing the 811 bills that legislators rushed to prefile before Tuesday’s opening of the 2025 General Assembly, I scrolled right on past bad bill after bad bill. But I couldn’t resist rubbernecking on a few occasions: You want to do what? And how?

You read about a few of them last week, when I looked at the hopes and dreams of the House’s “Freedom” Caucus. But while the caucus members are experts at disruption, they by no means have a lock on bad.

For example:

• We’ve had a smattering of threats against state legislators — Sen. Greg Hembree was threatened online when he pushed legislation to improve our schools, and Rep. Neal Collins was attacked by an angry virtual mob when he tried to coordinate emergency supplies to help his constituents through the aftermath of Hurricane Helene; someone slashed then-Sen. Katrina Shealy's tires, and shot a pellet through a window at her home — but probably no more than have been lodged against state employees as a result of inflammatory and misleading social media posts by state legislators.

Somehow, though, our legislators have managed to tough it out. But freshman Sen. Matt Leber isn’t taking any chances. The first bill he prefiled, S.152, would give legislators an extra $12,000 a year “to hire private security or install security devices.” No word on whether all those lawmakers who can stand the heat and don't need taxpayer-funded security will still get the supplement, which is more than their annual salary.

If it weren’t more than three years until the next Senate election, Mr. Leber might have an actual reason to fear his constituents — at the ballot box.

• Rep. Robert Williams has set his sights on a much less expensive legislative perk, which imposes on not just state government but also local governments (and, I presume, colleges). H.3544 requires any “state or local agency, entity, commission, or institution” to let legislators use their “athletic clubs or gymnasiums” free of charge.

• Never say criminals aren’t well-represented in our Legislature — or that House Democratic Leader Todd Rutherford can’t come up with anything more outrageous than he’s tried before. Now he wants to allow (or you might say encourage) judges to hide public information about criminals when they’re sentenced.

H.3146 doesn’t technically say judges can hide the name of the criminal, but they can hide his arrest, the charges filed against him, the case file, criminal history record and pictures. “The court shall weigh the public's interest in the defendant's criminal history record information being publicly available and the harm to the defendant's privacy,” the bill reads, implying incorrectly that reporting a criminal’s misdeeds somehow invades his “privacy.”

And not only does the bill apply to felons; it applies only to felons. You think he’s trolling us?

• Public school students are required under state law to say the Pledge of Allegiance every day, although state law allows individuals to decline to participate — an accommodation included in order to accommodate the Constitution. S.135 by Sen. Mike Reichenbach not only removes that exemption for all except the children of foreign diplomats (they’d just have to stand and remove their hats … which students shouldn’t be allowed to wear inside to begin with); it also requires all students to salute the flag every day. Can you spell significant damages awarded by federal courts for violating the First Amendment?

• Speaking of unconstitutional, H.3588 by Rep. Philip Bowers and House Republican Leader Davey Hiott would bring back the old law that prohibited municipalities from holding elections when only one candidate filed for a seat — thus rendering impossible a last-minute write-in campaign. (Then-Attorney General Henry McMaster, by the way, is the one who wrote the opinion explaining why this violated the S.C. Constitution.)

• I’m no fan of paying all these businesses to move to South Carolina, I believe we need to be much more aggressive about clawing back incentives from businesses that don’t meet their contractual agreements with the state, and I had a lot of concerns about all the secrecy that surrounded the mega-incentives we paid to lure Scout Motors to Blythewood. But S.132 is a bridge too far. Sen. Josh Kimbrell wants to claw back Scout’s incentives — not because it hasn’t met its promises but because it “has undertaken a vehicle deposit program to spark interest in their electric vehicles among the residents in this State” that might violate a law the company is lobbying to change: the Legislature’s longstanding sweetheart deal with the auto dealers who donate so generously to legislators’ election campaigns.

No word yet on when the senator plans to file a bill outlawing taxpayer-funded incentives or mandating enforcement of all those agreed-to clawback provisions.

• Finally, my apologies to Rep. Jay Kilmartin, first for not including his bill with the Freedom Caucus roundup and second for initially thinking he wanted to roll back the clock on South Carolina’s decades-long effort to relinquish our title as home of the least-qualified magistrates in the nation. Turns out that H.3590 does not repeal the provision that requires most magistrates to have a four-year college degree. It just eliminates similar education requirements for probate judges — and bans any post-high school educational requirements for elected officials.