S.C. House aiding special interests’ deception of voters

By CINDI ROSS SCOPPE

Associate Editor

HOUSE SPEAKER Bobby Harrell called a news conference not too long ago to warn voters about the out-of-state interests with “misleading names” that are trying to unseat a dozen of his fellow representatives in next month’s Republican primaries.

As if on cue, one of the groups handed out its first endorsements, complete with misleading claims about one of the lawmakers Mr. Harrell was sticking up for, Richland Rep. Bill Cotty.

Another of the groups told The Post and Courier it had no intention of telling anybody in South Carolina who was bankrolling its attempts to unseat legislators such as Mr. Cotty who oppose its plan to use tax money to subsidize private school tuition. (The group denies it’s trying to unseat legislators, of course, but that’s clearly one of the intended effects of its actions.)

If Mr. Harrell wants to know who’s to blame for all this, he need only look around him when he’s presiding over the House this afternoon.

It goes without saying that the S.C. Club for Growth and the ironically named South Carolinians for Responsible Government have become a cancer on our state. They are attempting a libertarian coup of South Carolina’s government so they can implement Gov. Mark Sanford’s worst ideas — as a start. Although they operate in the financial shadows, there’s good reason to believe they are bankrolled by out-of-state ideologues who have targeted our state because they think it’s small enough and we’re stupid enough that they can gain a foothold here from which to spread their radical agenda across the country.

But this bunch of extremists is just doing what the law allows.

It’s our own House of Representatives that has made it so easy for these groups to do the very things the speaker calls news conferences to denounce.

More than a year ago, I wrote a column detailing how the Legislature had inadvertently opened up a loophole in the campaign finance law that lets all sorts of special-interest groups hide in the shadows.

Where the loophole came from and what it does is a complicated story, so bear with me.

Several years ago, the State Ethics Commission said state law didn’t apply to groups that avoid so-called magic words such as “vote for” or “defeat.” As long as they used weaselly words such as “call Rep. Jones and tell him to stop” and pretended they weren’t working with either campaign, these groups didn’t have to tell anyone who was paying for their ads and get-out-the-vote campaigns and other efforts to try to get us to vote their way.

This was the loophole that helped the video poker barons unseat Gov. David Beasley in 1998.

In 2003, the Legislature finally tried to close the loophole, and require everybody who spends money to influence our votes to tell us where their money comes from. The law didn’t limit spending; it was merely supposed to require full reporting from any group that spent money to say anything good or bad about a candidate in the crucial final 45 days before an election.

But legislators got lost in a double-negative when they tried to make last-minute changes to the bill, and so what ended up passing doesn’t apply to these groups that have been dodging our laws by playing word games. Not only that, but it even allows groups that had been covered by our campaign finance laws all along to hide their activities during those final 45 days.

Less than a month after I wrote my column last March, the Senate passed a bill to close the giant new loophole.

Mr. Harrell’s predecessor said at the time that he wanted to wait to address the problem after a special review committee studied this and other campaign finance issues. That panel studied it, and unanimously recommended closing the loophole.

That was in October.

If the House had wanted to, it could have passed the Senate bill and had it on the governor’s desk by Jan. 17 — the fourth day of the legislative session.

If the House wanted to, it could put that bill on the governor’s desk a week from today.

I called House Judiciary Chairman Jim Harrison last week to ask him about the bill. Mr. Harrison, a favorite of South Carolinians for Responsible Government, told me his committee had simply been concentrating on getting House bills passed. With the session winding down, he said, he is meeting with his subcommittee chairman today to decide which Senate bills they want to get to the House floor.

He said he would “talk to the subcommittee chairman about (the bill) and see if we can’t get it on a subcommittee agenda in the next two weeks.”

If they fail, Mr. Harrell and the rest of the House need to bypass them and take up the bill anyway.

If that doesn’t happen, representatives will send a clear message to narrow-interest groups across the country that South Carolina’s government is up for sale to the highest bidder — no questions asked.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.