Putting an end to bobtailing

e-mail this story discuss this issue in our forums

outlaws legislative tack-ons. Then

lawmakers need a permanent ban.

The South Carolina Senate should sign on to a House resolution that calls for an end to the destructive practice of bobtailing. The resolution would outlaw bobtailing for the remainder of this legislative session. But this resolution should serve as a first step toward the General Assembly adopting a permanent ban on state lawmakers attaching unrelated items to popular bills.

Not only is bobtailing thought to be in violation of the state's constitution, it is also the preferred backdoor method by which many of this state's most odious laws and outrageous examples of pork barrel spending have survived the Legislature.

House Speaker David Wilkins and much of the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives pushed for the resolution. It corrects a glaring weakness in state lawmaking. It also should appease a governor who threatened to take the Legislature to court over bobtailing.

The state's constitution is clear: Laws adopted by the General Assembly must relate to one subject. But the recently passed — and now legally challenged — Life Sciences bill seems to be a textbook example of legislative excess. The bill was originally a jobs bill — an offer of economic incentives to pharmaceutical companies.

But by the time the bill hit the governor's desk, it had become a smorgasbord of pet projects and stealth restrictions intended to hamstring a governor who dared to express a desire to streamline an overbuilt system of higher education. The bill included amendments that created a new culinary arts program at Trident Technical College in the Lowcountry and earmarked $7 million for a new convention center in Myrtle Beach.

The worst and most controversial of the amendments makes the USC-Sumter branch campus into a four-year university. It passed against the wishes of the state's Commission on Higher Education and the president of the University of South Carolina. Lawmakers also passed a provision that forbids the governor from closing branch campuses.

Bobtailing allows weak or unpopular items that likely would not survive on their own to escape debate. Worse, the amendments often escape scrutiny altogether. The most infamous example is the amendment that opened the door to the video poker industry. Cloaked in misleading, benign language, a bobtailed amendment unleashed a gambling menace on South Carolina. This state doesn't need more of that from its Legislature.

The Legislature should move to correct this legislative flaw called bobtailing. The Senate should, in an exercise of good faith, sign on to this resolution. And next session, the entire General Assembly should permanently establish rules that expressly prohibit bobtailing.