Index-Journal. May 14, 2024.
Editorial: Setting sail with state legislature
Primary elections are just around the corner. Given how this year’s legislative session ended, it might be a good time to assess how well your lawmakers did. Or didn’t.
What South Carolinians do to and put in their bodies seems a high priority among our lawmakers. They voted to assure there’d be no gender transition surgeries on minors, even though there haven’t been any such surgeries in South Carolina to begin with. Make no mistake, however. Many of your lawmakers simply don’t want to provide any type of gender-affirming care to trans youths.
And while they don’t want residents to have access to medical marijuana, they might be OK with residents having access to a gunshot with the open carry legislation that passed.
Lawmakers are OK with adults consuming “hard liquor,” but they are not about to let them buy it on Sundays. No surprise there as it fits a level of hypocrisy often exhibited among many lawmakers and voters themselves. After all, there’s revenue to be made from alcohol sales, but let’s pretend no one drinks a drop of the hard stuff on Sundays.
No horse betting, either. The only gambling lawmakers sanction is the purchase of lottery tickets, all in the name of funding state education. That, of course, came years ago after lawmakers shut down video poker, which they could have taxed as a revenue stream. But doing something in the name of education is more palatable.
Lawmakers weren’t inclined this session to provide relief to restaurants facing outrageous insurance premiums to cover their liquor liability, nor were they inclined to allow curbside and home delivery of alcohol, all of which seems to fit neatly together with not allowing liquor sales on Sundays.
Anyway, there might yet be more action or inaction from down Columbia way in the coming weeks in an extended session of the state Legislature as they zig and then zag from positions of less government imposing on individuals’ rights to more government telling individuals — and the masses — what they can and cannot do.
It’s sometimes like watching a sailboat tack port and starboard on a narrow body of water.
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Times and Democrat. May 9, 2024.
Editorial: Join in making time to prepare for hurricanes
Gov. Henry McMaster has officially declared May as South Carolina Hurricane Preparedness Month ahead of a season that some experts are predicting will be extremely active.
The state’s theme this May is “Make the most of your time while you still have it.” This means the month is an opportunity for residents to assess and finalize their long-term storm preparations before the beginning of hurricane season on June 1.
According to a recent survey from Travelers Insurance, more than 50% of respondents in South Carolina are intensifying their preparations and have expressed increased concern about the 2024 hurricane season.
Among those who’ve weathered tropical storms or hurricanes in the past (59% of respondents), 74% are actively gearing up in advance. Yet, strikingly, over 40% South Carolina participants feel overwhelmed by media coverage leading up to hurricanes, sensing exaggeration in reporting and reactions to storms.
Broader data points:
Preparation: 38% of all respondents are more prepared for this hurricane season compared to previous years and 48% are more concerned about this hurricane season given forecasts indicating an “extremely active” season.
Extreme weather: 77% of respondents say the increase in other forms of severe weather (i.e., thunderstorms/large storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, floods, damaging winds, winter weather, hail) has influenced how they are preparing for this year’s hurricane season.
Steps for preparation: The top steps respondents are taking to prepare for this season are compiling/restocking emergency kits (46%), conducting property maintenance (41%) and creating an evacuation plan (32%).
Media perception: A third (33%) of respondents perceive media reporting on tropical storms/hurricanes as exaggerated, leading to feelings desensitization among 35% of respondents, consequently affecting their preparedness efforts.
The 2023 hurricane season featured 20 named storms, tied for the fourth most since records have been kept in the Atlantic Hurricane Basin. How…
South Carolina residents have particular reason to stay informed in 2024 as the majority of the state’s hurricane evacuation zones are changing. The South Carolina Emergency Management Division, along with state and local officials, will officially announce and launch the new zones during a media briefing May 9 at 11 a.m. as part of the Hurricane Awareness Tour at the Charleston Airport.
While many may believe evacuation affects primarily coastal residents, Orangeburg and other inland counties will be looking closely at the details to come from SCEMD. Being prepared for a flood of evacuees is essential.
In the meantime, be among those getting prepared this year, regardless of your assessment of predictions of an extreme season.
We join the experts in suggesting you prioritize a survival kit of things you might need if disaster strikes. And have equipment such as generators checked for operational readiness. Waiting until a hurricane is near may be too late.
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Post and Courier. May 14, 2024.
Editorial: Don’t let SC judicial selection improvements die over small differences
Legislators went into the final week of this year’s regular session with two major reforms within their grasp. The most important one — as we told you Sunday — appeared not to survive, although there’s a chance legislative leaders might be able to revive it.
The other, we’re happy to report, is alive. For now.
Of course, that surviving reform — of South Carolina’s judicial selection system — is not as significant as the plan to merge six fractured and fragmented health services agencies into one. Indeed, some reform advocates think both the House and Senate bills are so watered down that we’d be better off letting them die. We agree that they’re inadequate, but they still would improve our current system.
S.1046 is not on its way to Gov. Henry McMaster’s desk yet. The House and Senate passed slightly different versions, so six lawyer-legislators will have to work out those differences before the full House and Senate can approve or reject the compromise. Some of those conference committee members have been important supporters of reform; others have been hostile to the idea.
Both versions of the bill would allow the governor to appoint about a third of the members of the Judicial Merit Selection Commission, which determines who can even run for a judgeship and whose members currently are all appointed by legislative leaders.
Since the Legislature elects the judges, the governor ought to be able to appoint all the members, but getting a third of the seats is a huge improvement over the current system that locks one branch of government completely out of the process in which the second branch singlehandedly selects the members of the third branch.
The membership would actually be less crucial if this bill becomes law thanks to a change the House and Senate both agreed to: eliminating the three-nominee cap that was supposed to allow the commission to winnow down the field in each race to the very best candidates but which has been abused over the years.
That membership is still important, though, because the commission can find candidates unqualified, and that remaining power — which is completely appropriate — means having lawyer-legislators on the panel is still a problem.
Although our primary concern always has been the absence of gubernatorial input, the reason this matter is even being debated is because of growing public and legislative awareness of the problems with allowing a handful of lawyer-legislators to have inordinate sway over the judges they appear before in court. It’s a system, our state’s prosecutors say, that puts judges in an untenable situation as they try to be fair and impartial but realize that one of the lawyers standing before them could end their career.
The Senate version of the bill would allow legislative leaders to appoint as many as eight and as few as no legislators to a 12-member panel, but it’s difficult to imagine those leaders opting for no legislators. The House version requires that six members be legislators on a 13-member panel. We don’t like requiring that any of the panel members be legislators, but we definitely need to ensure a majority of members aren’t legislators, as the House does.
The Senate version also requires meetings of the commission to be livestreamed, and it prohibits candidates from dropping out between the beginning of public hearings and the release of the panel’s report on the candidates — a change designed to stop the panel from pressuring candidates to drop out by suggesting that the public will see unflattering material about them in the report if they don’t. These are both excellent changes that should be included in the final version.
There’s a lot of institutional baggage attached to some of the differences — the Senate wants much greater say over who becomes a judge, and the House wants to reform the process for selecting magistrates, which now is controlled by the Senate and in far too many cases by individual senators. That would be a recipe for corruption even without the special way some senators have learned to manipulate it.
We don’t care whether the Senate gets a greater say in judicial selections — there are legitimate arguments on both sides. But the public would certainly benefit if the House would go along with that in return for the Senate agreeing to the House’s changes to the magistrate system, which we desperately need.
What shouldn’t be allowed to happen is for the negotiators to fail to reach a compromise. There is plenty of room to change our current system for the better. If either side allows the negotiations to fall apart, that will be proof that legislators were never sincere about improving the way they select our judges.
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