Posted on Tue, Jan. 16, 2007

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Court order shows how deeply DOT rot permeates

“ABSURD,” the word chosen by the unanimous S.C. Supreme Court, is a good description of the interpretation legislators dreamed up when they decided to thumb their noses at the law they wrote limiting transportation commissioners to “one consecutive term.”

“Arrogant,” “out-of-control,” “presumptuous” and, of course, “wasteful” would be good descriptions of the Transportation Commission itself, which voted last year to squander tax dollars defending the legislative abuses that the court so summarily rejected last week.

All that makes “naive” or “ludicrous” or perhaps “outrageous” beyond words” rather good descriptions of the very idea that the Legislature can transform the Transportation Department by nipping around the edges, particularly if that nipping retains an appointment role for these same law-defying legislators.

It’s getting hard to keep up with all the outrages at the Transportation Department, so a recap is in order: In 1993, the last time the Legislature pretended to reform the state’s least accountable agency, it passed a law that prohibited lawmakers from appointing a commissioner for “more than one consecutive term.”

It took less than a decade for some lawmakers to start ignoring that law, and by 2005 half the district commissioners were serving a second consecutive term.

This absurdity very likely would have spread to the entire board had Greenville good-government gadfly Ned Sloan not launched another of his famous lawsuits, this one asking simply that the Legislature either obey the law as written or else change it. The lawsuit named the three illegal commissioners as defendants, but its target clearly was the Legislature; it just as clearly was not the Transportation Department or the board itself, which had no say in whom legislators appointed.

But members of the Transportation Commission, like members of its predecessor Highway Commission, have been more mindful of their own petty prerogatives than the taxpayers’ money, and visions of their own lifetime appointments no doubt danced in the heads of even the three serving legally. So our profligate, self-serving transportation commissioners voted to use public money to defend the three individuals Mr. Sloan sought to have removed from among them.

Meanwhile, over at the State House, some legislators were defending their illegal appointments by claiming, with straight faces, that “one consecutive term” actually means two terms in a row. That’s the defense that the high court appropriately called “absurd.” In addition to referring legislators to the dictionary, the court suggested that anyone who read the statute that way would have to argue that governors could serve three consecutive terms, since the constitution limits them to “two successive terms.”

It is against that backdrop that we hear a growing chorus of legislators insisting that, yes, of course, they intend to reform the Transportation Department — as long as they get to define “reform” in much the same way they defined “consecutive.”

The Transportation Department has been a political playground for decades, infested with a pervasive cultural rot that has survived at least one half-hearted attempt at reform, and surely will survive another. Anything less than actual reform — which at a minimum means it is accountable to the governor and individual legislators can no longer secretly pull strings as a matter of course — is a complete and total waste of time, and a fraud upon the public.