BRACK: Legislative turtles enough to make some run for office

By Andy Brack, editor and publisher  |   There’s so much frustration with politics as usual that maybe this is the year for grassroots candidates who are trying to win without big piles of money.

Anybody with a lick of common sense has got to be more than a little annoyed by what’s been going on in the Statehouse.  Just look at the recent week as GOP lawmakers, knowing a primary is just three weeks away, trotted out the always divisive abortion issue to throw a little red meat to voters and prove their “conservative credentials.”  At issue is a ban on abortions after 19 weeks, a measure that opponents are shouting is unconstitutional and scary because it will harm women (not to mention that men again are making decisions about women’s bodies).

Then there was Gov. Nikki Haley’s nonsensical veto of a $40 million package of aid for the state’s farmers who were smashed down by last year’s flooding.  The tone-deaf governor, who hands out incentives to corporate interests as if they were party favors, dug in her heels and said the state didn’t do bailouts.  Yeah, right.  At least the legislature didn’t have any of it, overriding her veto by landslides in the House and Senate.

Finally, after two years of vowing major changes to fix and maintain the state’s potholed roads and decaying bridges, state lawmakers are putting final touches on a plan that is little better than half a haircut — it kicks the can down the road to getting real infrastructure fixes because it tries to borrow the state’s way out of the problem of not investing enough money for roads for the last two decades.

With all of this going on, education is getting underfunded.  The state hasn’t really dealt with tens of thousands of poor people without real health care.  There’s been too much foot-dragging with reforming ethics laws, despite the toppling of the state’s number two and three elected officials in recent years.

It’s enough to, say, make you want to run for office to smack incumbents on the side of their heads.

“I ain’t blaming a single person in Columbia because we’re the folks who keep electing these folks,” said Great Falls resident Mike Fanning, a Democrat who faces state Sen. Creighton Coleman, D-Winnsboro, in the June 14 primary.  “They’re doing what we have asked them to do because we keep reelecting them for doing it.

Fanning

“If every time my dog chews on my sofa and I give him a cookie, he’s going to tear up my sofa,” said Fanning, long a critic of the state’s billions of dollars of tax exemptions for special interests.  “If every election, candidates keep resurrecting tired, old, divisive issues right before a primary and we keep electing them, then we deserve what we’re getting, which is movement on nothing.”

Duncan Mayor Lisa Cooley Scott is one of three Republicans trying to unseat state Sen. Lee Bright, the Spartanburg County legislator who has created a lot of enmity recently for trying to push through a bill to make people use bathrooms associated with their birth gender.

Scott

“Frankly, I’m sick and tired of us basically having an empty chair in Columbia,” said Scott, a 53-year-old licensed social worker who runs a family real estate company.  “He’s made some gestures of things.  They’re celebrity headline-grabbing things that are not important issues and he hasn’t addressed important issues.”

She said she was running for Senate to do real work on real problems that real people have, such as fixing crumbling infrastructure with dedicated, recurring revenue and improving workforce development.

“Between Donald Trump and some of the people in our legislature, we have some very divisive factors going on, not only in our state, but in our country.  We need to be united and coming together instead of fighting each other.”

South Carolina is fortunate to have some serious legislators who tackle big problems.  But they keep getting stalled by legislative turtles who want us to keep our eyes on the hole, not the doughnut.  Let’s keep the serious ones and throw out the turtles.

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