TO UNDERSTAND how absurd it is for legislators to argue that state law allows Transportation Department commissioners to serve back-to-back terms, step back in time with me for a moment.

It’s mid-September 1988, and a dozen or so legislators from Lexington, Edgefield, McCormick and Saluda counties are packed into the conference room overlooking the Senate chamber. The discarded hulls of boiled peanuts fill ashtrays and plastic cups and spill over onto the carpet. Crumpled Coke and Pepsi cans litter the conference table.

The legislators have long passed testy.

Over the course of the past week, they have taken 92 votes in what appears to be a futile effort to comply with a Supreme Court order that they select a new highway commissioner to represent the 11th judicial circuit.

Sen. John Drummond, like a majority of the 16 legislators whose districts are in that circuit, is present but not voting. “No judge is going to tell me who I’m going to vote for,” he declares.

Rep. John Pettigrew is just as adamant — but on the other side. “If the court were to say that we all need to go to jail and stay there until we elect a commissioner, maybe that’s what we all need to do,” he tells me after legislators adjourn in defiance of the high court.

Mr. Pettigrew and Sen. Tom Moore had initiated this impasse earlier in the year when they filed a lawsuit to try to force their colleagues to obey the law that required highway commissioners to be elected from a different county each term, and that required that they be selected from among three candidates nominated by the legislators who represent the host county. Lexington Sens. Joe Wilson and Ryan Shealy had spearheaded a successful effort to ignore that law and appoint Clark DuBose (the brother of Lexington Republican vice chairwoman Jackie Black), who lived in Edgefield County but was not the choice of Mr. Pettigrew or Mr. Moore.

A month before this September meeting, the state Supreme Court had agreed with Messrs. Pettigrew and Moore that Mr. DuBose’s selection was invalid, and had given the delegation 10 days to select one of their choices — something most legislators were determined not to do.

Their ploy would not work: A week after this meeting, the high court ruled that the 13 members of the delegation who abstained had given up their right to have a say — much the same way people who stay home on Election Day give up their right to choose elected officials. That meant the Edgefield delegation’s favorite candidate, James Satcher, had been elected on a vote of 3-0.

Mr. Wilson threatened to file a federal lawsuit, but ended up dropping the matter once he realized he didn’t have a legal leg to stand on. As a lower court judge had ruled early on in the case, if legislators think the selection process is unfair, they are “in a unique position” to change it.

Indeed, Mr. Wilson had tried to change it — several times, unsuccessfully. It was only after the rest of the Legislature refused to change the law that he had decided simply to ignore it.

Then-Judge Walter Bristow’s order rejecting the Wilson coup went on: “Neither the legislative nor any other branch of government can effectively operate unless people of good will in positions of authority carry out the duties imposed upon them by the (state) Constitution and statutes.... Until the law is changed, however, it is surely not too much for this court and the public to expect that they will obey the law.”

The county rotation law, which dates at least to 1955 and was transferred over to the Transportation Department when it was created in 1993, was not some obscure statute, observed primarily by its breach. It was crucial to legislators’ ability to deliver asphalt pork to their small or rural counties — crucial enough that they would disrupt the normal niceties of legislative decorum with legal action, if that’s what it took to enforce it.

Nor was the DuBose/Satcher appointment an obscure case. In addition to the fact that it led to a lawsuit between legislators, both men managed to keep themselves — and the issues surrounding their appointments — very much in the news.

The Supreme Court ruling came in the midst of a drawn-out scandal involving a confidential tax document that a SLED agent gave to Mr. DuBose just before it wound up in the hands of a TV reporter, leading to the firing of the SLED agent and a very public appeal of that firing. And within a year-and-a-half of Mr. Satcher’s appointment, the State Ethics Commission reprimanded him for unethical conduct in requesting a $450,000 paving job on a road through his property.

And now, less than two decades later, legislators are acting as though Martians somehow hacked into secure state computers and wrote a bizarre county-rotation law that is both incomprehensible and illogical. It’s enough to make you question their intelligence — or their honesty.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.