The South Carolina Senate was never known as a reform-oriented body. In fact, it was designed from the beginning to be conservative in the traditional sense of the word: resistant to change, any change, good or bad. And reforms are, by definition, changes. This resistance to change still prevails today – through rules that allow a single senator to prevent debate over all but the most important legislation – regardless of whether the change is good or bad, whether it meets the modern definition of “liberal” or “conservative”. “
So it is particularly encouraging that the Senate is leading the way in reforming South Carolina’s secretive process of distributing tax money to lawmakers’ favorite projects.
Even before Governor Henry McMaster could renew his request for reserve reform during his State of the State address on Wednesday, the Senate had already amended its rules with better reform designed to remove secrecy from the process. In fact, that was the first thing the Senate did after taking office at the opening of the 2021 General Assembly last week.
The new rule, drafted by Republican Senate leader Shane Massey, will not prevent the legislature from funding boondoggles or even smart programs that simply should be paid for by local taxpayers or individuals. But it will ensure that senators and the public finally know how money is being spent on these special allocations and who is behind them. To this end, it prohibits the Senate from voting on the state budget until the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee provides a list of all funds, along with who requested them, how much they cost and “an explanation of the project or program”. The rule applies to any “allocation for a specific program or project that did not originate from a written request for an agency’s budget or is not included in a previous fiscal year appropriation law.”
It also requires a written explanation of any funds included in the final version of the budget negotiated by a House-Senate conference committee, although that explanation only needs to identify which body made the request.
This points to the obvious shortcoming of the rule: it does not identify the sponsors of funds from the Chamber. House Ways and Means President Murrell Smith told the Post and Seanna Adcox of the Courier last year that he intended to lift the veil of secrecy from House duties, but we need more than a promise from the legislator. The Chamber must adopt its own version of the Senate rule.
Democratic Senator Dick Harpootlian, one of the leaders of the bipartisan anti-linkage campaign, told us that while he and Mr. Massey believe the rule will eliminate all local parks, fire trucks and civic programs that may or may not be worthwhile. , “We won’t know until we try to use it” and see if budget makers find a way around this.
Critics of the rule predicted just that last year, when sponsors launched a similar proposal, noting that lawmakers could simply go directly to state agency directors and ask them to include their special projects in those agencies’ budgets. And that could happen, but it is doubtful, because it misinterprets the point and the process of the brands.
Agency directors would not respond to such requests from most lawmakers, even if most lawmakers had the audacity to ask. They finance the money because the money is in the state budget and instructions on how to spend it come from the budget writers in the House and Senate, or, more often, from their employees. Although budget writers certainly claim their share of funding for their own pet projects, they mainly use the funds as a tool, offering them to lawmakers who would otherwise not have the influence to get their projects funded in exchange for their vote. legislators to approve the entire state budget.
We should never have to do the government that way, but maybe we do. Still, there is no justification for the secret process South Carolina uses: there are no official budget documents to explain or even identify the funds. The public has no way of finding out what is being financed until long after the budget has been debated and approved. Most lawmakers don’t even know.
Hence the new Senate rule, which was inserted in the rewrite of the entire set of operational rules in the Senate – something that is produced every four years after a new Senate is installed. While other changes to the rules drew wide debate, no one spoke out against the reform mark.
Either it is a really encouraging sign that the senators have finally recognized that there is simply no way to defend public money spending so secretly – or else an indication that the reformers have been deceived again. We hope it will be the first.
