It was easy to predict that SC Governor Henry McMaster would use his state’s state speech on Wednesday to urge lawmakers to invest more state resources in 4-year-old kindergarten, broadband infrastructure, university-based scholarships. in the needs and subsidies for training of labor and suspend the freezing of the annual increases in the cost of living for teachers that legislators regrettably but understandably implemented last year.
All of these initiatives were part of its executive budget, revealed the week before, and they are all smart investments that lawmakers must make to help fulfill our government’s most important duty: educating the next generation.
The governor predictably also asked lawmakers to provide another round of subsidies for small businesses that are struggling to survive the COVID-19 pandemic, which also makes sense, since it can be financed with single money that we have in surprising abundance. Of course, he launched his long-awaited calls to create a new program to pay parents to leave public schools and lower a state income tax rate that looks high on paper, but is not in practice – popular ideas with its base that don’t do nothing to change our state forward.
And he rightly renewed his call on lawmakers to reform or sell Santee Cooper. This was not part of his budget, but it is something he never stopped talking about – and something that the Legislature cannot stop talking about until it takes action. We have yet to see anything to suggest that the sale of Santee Cooper will be in the best interest of taxpayers or taxpayers, but the state utility was late for a liability injection before it even spent $ 4 billion on an abandoned nuclear construction project.
What was not so predictable was that Mr. McMaster would focus on the kind of good government initiatives that have been put in the background since the pandemic hit our state in March. This was an understandable shift in focus, but the governor is absolutely right to believe that it is time to engage again.
There is no better place to start than the reform of the magistrate. As Mr. McMaster noted, the people of South Carolina are more likely to face a magistrate than any other type of judge, but “these judges receive little public scrutiny before being confirmed, they receive limited legal training and do not are required to be lawyers in good standing with the Bar. ”In fact, as Joseph Cranney of the Post and Courier reported, there are numerous examples of magistrates who lack the knowledge or ethics to serve as judges, but remain in court because individual senators select the magistrates in their districts.
Mr. McMaster would demand that magistrates go through the same type of public screening process as other judges and, more dramatically, he would demand that they be lawyers. Even though this second idea is impractical in some smaller counties, it is a goal for which we must start working, and the first must be adopted now, along with the changes already proposed to close a loophole that allows magistrates to hide previous ethical infractions when apply for a new appointment.
We also welcome the governor’s new call to expand the definition of lobbying to cover more efforts to influence the decisions of state agencies and local governments and school districts. The law that prohibits lobbyists from giving gifts or campaign donations to lawmakers was written in the wake of the Lost Trust’s federal corruption framework, which resulted in the conviction of a tenth of the legislature for selling its votes to a lobbyist who worked undercover for the FBI. .
But in more than a quarter of a century since then, the influence industry has increasingly concentrated its efforts on city and town councils and school councils, where those same restrictions do not apply, resulting in local officials accepting gifts that tempt them to put your personal interests above the interests of the public. It is past time to place the local lobby under the same rules as the legislative lobby.
Our state lost a lot because of COVID-19. There is no reason for us to continue to miss the opportunity for a government that best serves us.
