More cynical lawmaking

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others to Life Sciences Act invites

veto that won't stop the excess.

The Life Science Act, arguably the most important bill the General Assembly will consider this session, should be stripped of the dead weight amendments attached to it.

The bill provides financial incentives to biotech and pharmaceutical companies that have the potential to add hundreds of new jobs in the Upstate. The bill also includes $225 million for infrastructure improvements at the state's three research universities. It gives the schools the freedom they covet — and need — to enter partnerships with private business to boost research funding.

Lawmakers should send the governor a clean bill. But there's little chance of that.

Gov. Mark Sanford has threatened a veto if the politically inspired measures to expand or protect colleges aren't removed in a House-Senate conference committee, but it appears those measures will survive. The committee, which could give final approval to this bill as early as Thursday, includes an influential champion of the very excess weighing this bill down. Sen. Phil Leventis, D-Sumter, was the most visible cheerleader of making USC-Sumter a four-year school despite opposition from the university's president and the board of trustees.

Other amendments include establishing a culinary arts school at Trident Technical College in Charleston and shielding two USC branch campuses — Union and Allendale — targeted by Sanford for closure.

Even many lawmakers who disagree with these tactics will likely vote for the bill. They don't want to kill a measure that, on the whole, will vastly improve higher education and attract jobs to a state starving for them. Despite its problems, this bill is probably veto-proof.

But that doesn't excuse this latest example of how counterproductive bobtailing is to efficient state spending and transparent lawmaking. Bobtailing is when amendments — typically those that stand little chance to pass on their merits — are attached to bills universally embraced by the General Assembly. Pet projects, ill-defined laws and just plain bad ideas usually become law by using this tactic. It is lawmaking at its most cynical because it does not accommodate debate or force new measures to stand up to the means testing they should.

A stench will forever follow the USC-Sumter expansion, as it bypassed the Commission on Higher Education that should have been given the chance to sign off on it before it got the Legislature.

Three years of stagnant revenues, deficits and budget cutting should be enough for lawmakers to declare the days of politics as usual over in Columbia. Higher education decisions shouldn't be made like this. South Carolina doesn't have the money to tolerate such inefficiency. Mostly, it can't continue to allow provincialism to dictate decision-making — a practice that guarantees that this state's system of colleges and universities is forever overbuilt and insufficiently funded.