Legislators should stop giving cushy jobs to themselves

WE’VE COME A LONG way in the way we handle judicial and quasi-judicial positions in South Carolina.

Used to be, they all went, pretty much automatically, to legislators.

Then we said legislators had to wait four years before they could sit on the rate-making Public Service Commission, and we wrote some qualifications (albeit severely lacking) for the job.

We abolished the Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission and gave its work to administrative law judges.

We toughened the requirements for judges and required that legislators resign a year before running.

But we still have a way to go. The qualifications for magistrates — and indeed, too many magistrates — are far from adequate. And one bastion of legislative logrolling remains: the Employment Security Commission. Its three members, who are paid $97,000 a year primarily to hear appeals from workers denied unemployment benefits, need only be elected by the Legislature. There are no requirements for any sort of training, the screening panel that reviews candidates doesn’t bother to delve into how they might approach the job, and there are no restrictions on legislators seeking the jobs.

So it should come as no surprise that when one of the former legislators on the commission announced last year that she was stepping down, the only candidates to apply for the job were two current legislators. As a result, as least one of those legislators — and possibly more, since one could conceivably knock off an incumbent — will get the job when their colleagues in the Legislature hold an election today.

It’s difficult to know where to begin addressing the problems with this situation.

Let’s start with the most obvious: Legislators should not be allowed to run for high-paid positions selected by their colleagues — particularly when there are no objective criteria or qualifications for the job — because they have an unfair advantage over non-legislators. Their colleagues almost always elect them, sometimes because they like them, sometimes because they dislike them and want to get them out of the Legislature, sometimes because they’re afraid of retribution if they don’t elect them. (This time is particularly problematic since one of the candidates, Rep. Becky Richardson, chairs the House Ethics Committee, which is authorized to discipline House members for ethical lapses.) All of this means that outsiders aren’t seriously considered, and most often they don’t even bother to run. So there is little chance of getting the most capable people.

Beyond that, it is astounding that any sort of quasi-judicial position could be filled with absolutely no formal criteria. Clearly, these commissioners don’t have as much influence on as many people as actual judges, and the decisions they make don’t require as much technical knowledge as those of PSC commissioners. But still, there should be some qualification other than having served an apprenticeship in the Legislature.

Ideally the Legislature should call off today’s election, get to work on legislation to prohibit sitting members being selected and re-open the application process. But there’s little chance of that. More realistically, lawmakers should make that change going forward. And while they’re at it, they should seriously consider whether we need this special, high-paid board of hearing officers, or whether this task could better and more efficiently be treated like the old liquor-license board and turned over to administrative law judges.