While members of the Georgia House of Representatives scurried about Wednesday to get things done by the midnight deadline, members of the South Carolina House of Representatives were on a week of "furlough."
Georgia restricts its legislative session to 40 days. It started on Jan. 12, a day ahead of South Carolina. Now it is finished. In that time, it approved a budget that is three times the size of South Carolina's. It got its business done despite having many more members to be heard. Georgia has 180 House seats and 56 Senate seats, compared to South Carolina's 124 and 46.
Georgia -- with more people, more counties, more dollars, more representatives -- gets done in about three months what it takes South Carolina five months to do. Both bodies will leave with "unfinished business" and both will say they "worked hard."
There is something wrong with this picture. And what is wrong with it unfolds in painful detail day by day in Columbia.
South Carolina's full Senate has yet to even take up its primary task -- passing a budget.
Yet the Senate -- being filibustered so a few can keep the majority from saving lives with a stricter seat belt law -- has had time for the following statesmanship:
"Baseball is second only to sex in terms of interest to men. And I'm not going to come up here and talk about sex. That would be in poor taste. I'll stick to baseball."
State Sen. John Kuhn, R-Charleston, wasted his time, the Senate's time and the taxpayers' time and money with that nonsense last week, as quoted by the Charleston Post & Courier.
We'll assume Kuhn's aggravating drivel is not typical of statements made before the Senate. But it is typical of statements made by people with too much time on their hands.
South Carolina legislators will acknowledge softball teams, businesses and scores of hometown individuals. Yet, these feel-good gestures, which are as much a part of the proceedings as the gavel itself, are not the real problem in a meandering legislative calendar. The bigger problem is the harm the body can do with all its superfluous time. It can tinker with school curricula, environmental regulations and veer into decisions that belong at the county or municipal level.
Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue contends his legislature did not pass a balanced budget and threatens to call them back into special session. There have been a couple of those sessions over the past decade. It would cost Georgia taxpayers $45,000 a day. But South Carolina builds in all that excess spending by scheduling an excessive legislative session. And still it has faced similar threats of a special session from a governor.
Veteran House Speaker David Wilkins, R-Greenville, and other leaders have called for a shorter legislative session in South Carolina. It's time to quit talking about it and do it.