Tell legislators: The status quo isn’t serving S.C.

AS THE PLAN TO PUT the state’s chief executive in charge of the executive branch of government started crumbling, Sen. Greg Gregory put things in perspective. “What we’re saying,” he told fellow senators, “is that we’re satisfied with the status quo in South Carolina.”

He’s not exaggerating. Here’s what Sen. Robert Ford had just said of Gov. Mark Sanford’s personal plea to make South Carolina’s government structure more like the one in the rest of the states: “We didn’t see nothing wrong with the process, and yet we get a newcomer in state government saying, ‘Let’s do it over.’”

Sen. Ford and others who derive their personal power and influence from the status quo may well see nothing wrong with state government and the job it does serving the people of our state. But most of us do.

A decade ago, the battle cry for reform came from a bureaucrat who asked: “Why are we at the bottom of every list we’d like to be at the top of, and at the top of every list that we'd like to be at the bottom of?”

As a result, we gave the governor control of a third of the executive branch — an improvement, but far from what was needed. Since then, we have improved in some areas and fallen even farther behind in others. But the bottom line is that 109 years after our government structure was created, we remain one of the poorest and least educated states in the nation, a state where we’re more likely than most to be a victim of a crime or a fatal crash or to become infected or die of a host of diseases, a state that can’t create jobs or maintain our roads or even get people to vote.

“Who sounds like they’ve got a plan for moving the state of South Carolina forward?” Sen. Gregory asked. “The governor, or us here in the last two hours?”

Our state ranks in the bottom five nationally when it comes to the amount of authority we give governors to run the state. Perhaps it’s a coincidence that one of the states that has most emasculated its governors continually winds up at the top of all the bad lists and the bottom of all the good lists. But we don’t believe that. Neither do the scores of South Carolinians who, over the last century, have produced 15 studies that reached the same conclusion: We need to give the governor the power to run the executive branch of government.

On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee disemboweled the proposal to ask voters whether the governor should appoint the comptroller general, secretary of state and lieutenant governor and the directors of the Education and Agriculture departments and the National Guard — which would reduce the number of independent executive branch offices from nine to three and bring us in line with other states. Supporters will try to revive the proposal next week, along with another to put governors in charge of some agencies controlled by independent commissions. Neither effort will amount to much as long as legislators believe the status quo is giving us the results we deserve.

Every one of us needs to let our senator and representative know that the status quo is not acceptable.

What is the alternative? If we don’t empower the governor, what are we going to do to improve the quality of life in our state? Opponents have yet to answer this question. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result isn’t just the definition of insanity. It is also the recipe for certain failure.