Post & Courier uncovers ALEC's reach in SC

Reporters Robert Behre and Stephen Largen have outdone themselves with an investigative report on the influence of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in the South Carolina legislature, and by extension, on the public policy governing the lives of millions of South Carolinians.

With extensive background reporting, complete narratives, examples and facts, Behre and Largen set a standard that I hope The State and other papers in South Carolina will emulate in their own coverage of ALEC -- when they get around to mentioning it.

Read it and weep.

Sen. Mike Rose stood up on the Senate floor earlier this month to clear confusion over a bill and asked for a delay so he could check with the measure’s creator.

But the proposal’s author wasn’t a fellow lawmaker or anybody in South Carolina.

“This is an American Legislative Exchange Council bill,” the Summerville Republican told his colleagues. “What I would like to do over the break is to do the research now with ALEC and address the senator from Orangeburg’s concerns.”

The moment provided a rare public outing of a little-known player in the state Legislature — a Washington-based, mostly corporate-funded nonprofit that pairs lawmakers across the country with business interests.

Since 1973, they have worked together in private — often at resort-hosted retreats — to craft proposed laws addressing everything from health care to education to gun laws and even voting rights.

Some corporations behind ALEC, among the largest companies in the country, stand to profit from passage of the group’s ready-made, model bills.

The group identifies itself as nonpartisan and working to advance free-market enterprise and limited government at the state level.

ALEC has Democratic members, including a few in South Carolina, but its bills most often line up with the GOP agenda.

The extent of ALEC’s influence in the Palmetto State is difficult to nail down, as there is no complete or definitive public tracking of just how many of its model bills have been introduced or passed here in some form over the years.

But the group’s bills are materializing at the Statehouse.

It’s rare for state legislators to publicly admit that a bill they sponsor is actually the work of ALEC, but the similarities between the group’s model bills and some introduced here are undeniable. Whole sections of some, with a few words changed, match ALEC models.

Some of ALEC’s member lawmakers say the bipartisan group provides useful assistance in weighing the impact of legislation on corporations and job creators, assistance not unlike the National Conference of State Legislatures.

But more often, critics say the group has taken on an increasingly conservative tilt. Some say ALEC provides corporations a way to influence lawmakers without it being reported to state ethics watchdogs.

“We feel that for a group like ALEC, a lot of how they make these bills is done in secret through corporate money and without public input,” said Liz Bartolomeo, a spokeswoman with the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based, nonpartisan group that advocates for government openness.
Voter registration bill

Charleston GOP Sen. Chip Campsen is an ALEC member and among the co-sponsors of the state’s controversial voter ID bill that passed last year.

The bill was signed into law by Republican Gov. Nikki Haley but subsequently blocked by the U.S. Justice Department, which said it discriminated against minorities.

The measure requires voters to bring a photo ID to the polls as a way to protect against fraud, bill supporters have said.

S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson sued the federal government, arguing the state’s voter ID law does not discriminate.

South Carolina was among a group of states to pass voter ID measures last year.

Language in many of the bills, including South Carolina’s, bears some similarities to ALEC’s model voter ID bill.

Earlier this month, after a fund- raiser in downtown Columbia for a national group that supports voter ID laws, Campsen said he developed his bill on his own without input from any organizations, including ALEC.

He said there could be a couple of reasons for similarities between the group’s model bill and his own. “Maybe people copied me,” he said.

But Campsen said it’s more likely ALEC copied laws from two other states whose voter ID measures have been upheld by the courts.

“I’ve introduced a lot of legislation in response to Supreme Court decisions, and that’s been my practice,” he said.

While the state waits for a resolution to Wilson’s lawsuit challenging the federal block, Campsen has introduced another measure that would impact voting rights.

Specifically, the bill would limit the types of IDs residents can use to register to vote.

Currently, state residents who want to register to vote must provide a valid photo ID or a copy of a current utility bill, bank statement, paycheck or government document that shows their name and address.

Campsen’s bill, titled the “Voter Citizenship Verification Act,” would limit acceptable forms of identification to a military ID, South Carolina or other state-issued ID, a birth certificate, naturalization documents or a passport.

The new measure, which has cleared a Senate panel, bears striking similarities to ALEC’s “Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act,” which lays out the same proposed requirements to register to vote.

The wording of the two bills also matches up closely in several sections.

Campsen did not respond to calls seeking comment on his new bill.

Another ALEC proposal that has passed in South Carolina was part of last year’s Fairness in Civil Justice Act.

That measure’s two-part trial, where a jury first determines compensatory damages, then punitive damages, is very similar to ALEC’s “Punitive Damages Standards Act.”

The interstate health care compact bill, which Rose identified on the floor of the Senate as ALEC-created, passed the Senate earlier this month.
How it works

Lawmakers pay $100 for a two-year membership in ALEC, but that makes up less than 2 percent of the group’s annual income. Most comes from corporate donations, conferences, advertising and publications.

Wait a second: Does this mean that WE, as taxpayers, pay the membership fee for these men and women to collect model legislation to use against us?

Can we not adopt a new law prohibiting the use of public funds to buy memberships in ALEC?

In return, lawmakers may attend a few meetings a year, such as its spring task force meeting set for May 11 in Charlotte. There, they break into committees with corporate members and work on model bills.

The elected officials’ expenses incurred attending meetings can be reimbursed by the group, or lawmakers sometimes pay their own way out of their campaign accounts.

“Why shouldn’t the private sector be able to sit at a table and discuss legislation that affects the country and them and people?” Rose asked. “The legislators that I know who are conscientiously trying to figure out what’s the best thing are using these organizations to obtain information. They’re certainly not a rubber stamp.”

Almost 2,000 lawmakers from all 50 states are members — about 25 percent — and ALEC bills itself as the nation’s largest nonpartisan individual membership association of state lawmakers. Its alumni include Haley and U.S. Rep. Tim Scott, R-North Charleston.

Rose likened ALEC to the National Conference of State Legislatures, a publicly-backed bipartisan group that also works on model bills.

State Rep. Liston Barfield, R-Conway, serves as a co-chair of ALEC in South Carolina and also as the secretary of its national board of directors.

Barfield said he first got involved with ALEC when he was a Democrat serving in the House in the 1980s.

“There’s no other organization that lets us hear what the business community is thinking,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we support them on every issue, but at least that gives us insight into what they’re thinking about and what is affecting their business.”

Respectfully, doesn't the state Chamber of Commerce do that? Really, the state chamber is well represented inside and outside the legislative chambers, and I would think that they have a chokehold on the best thinking of the state's business community, so no lawmaker has to look to any outside group for such expertise.

Nationally, ALEC claims more than a thousand of its model bills are introduced each year, and about 17 percent of them become law.

However, the group offers no full breakdown by state. Barfield said some of ALEC’s bills have become law in South Carolina, but, “I don’t have a list of them. I never sat down and tried to figure them out.”
Recent controversy

In recent weeks, ALEC has faced a crush of controversy in the wake of the fatal shooting of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla.

While the state waited more than six weeks to bring charges against neighborhood watch member George Zimmerman, who shot Martin, the national spotlight turned to Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law. That law allows people to use deadly force if they feel threatened in a public place.

When applied, as it was initially in the Martin case, those using deadly force are immune from prosecution. Zimmerman was charged later through a special prosecutor.

While Florida’s 2005 law did not stem from ALEC’s work, the group did create a model bill along the same lines that expands the so-called “Castle Doctrine” to areas outside a person’s home.

ALEC’s push for stand-your-ground laws has resulted in some groups calling for corporations to end their support for the group, with some success.

And last week ALEC announced it would focus solely on economic issues going forward.

But the group had been under growing scrutiny even before Martin’s death.

The Center for Media and Democracy, a Washington nonprofit critical of the group’s influence, recently received more than 800 previously secret ALEC model bills and then posted them on its website, providing a rare public glimpse of ALEC’s workings.

Brendan Fischer, a law fellow with the center, said the group hopes this new sunshine will increase voters’ awareness of the previously low-key group.

“They have this huge influence on the laws that govern us, but the public isn’t even allowed in. The press isn’t even allowed in,” he said. “It’s all happening without any public oversight or accountability.”

Fischer said part of the center’s concerns stem from how the corporations working through ALEC aren’t named on most lawmakers’ state ethics reports.

South Carolina lawmakers who have received grants and scholarships to attend ALEC events have declared them as ALEC donations on their campaign disclosure forms, but the names of the corporations themselves don’t appear there. “It’s layering influence on top of influence and it’s all happening outside the bounds of state ethics laws,” Fischer said.

Well, then, here's another opportunity to bring sunlight and transparency to the process: Let's adopt a new law requiring lawmakers to identify to corporate sources of their "grants and scholarships" whenever they attend conferences they don't pay to attend.

ALEC critics in South Carolina focus less on the ethics angle than what they see as an increasingly partisan edge to its model bills.

Sen. John Land, D-Manning, said he once contributed to ALEC when it hosted a meeting in Hilton Head. But he said the group now has lost its way. He cited its voter ID bill as “highly discriminatory and totally unnecessary.”

Such laws may seem beyond ALEC’s scope of pushing for limited government and free markets. But, Fischer said, “You could see how this would indirectly benefit big business because if you can reduce voter turnout in populations that tend to vote Democratic, you’re going to be more likely to have Republicans in office, and those Republicans are more likely to pass the kind of laws you want passed.”

Sen. Brad Hutto, D-Orangeburg, said he joined ALEC after first winning office in the mid 1990s but quickly left the group without attending a conference after discovering what he described as the group’s one-sided, conservative bent and one-size-fits-all approach.

But Sen. Thomas Alexander, a Walhalla Republican who serves with Barfield as state co-chair of ALEC, said the group is best understood as an educational tool.

“I just think it’s healthy to be involved and listen to ideas and listen to national trends and get together with colleagues,” he said, adding that even the National Conference of State Legislatures has its critics.

Rose, the GOP senator from Summerville, said ALEC’s role in formulating bills should not be voters’ prime concern.

“In the end, our Legislature passes or doesn’t passes legislation, so the origin of the legislation really doesn’t matter,” he said.

Respectfully again, I suggest the origin of legislation does matter.

When boneheaded proposals crop up before our committees and lawmakers, I want to be able to identify the proposal with the person who proposed it. If our lawmakers have to cull through an ALEC legislative catalog to find the proposals to resolve South Carolinians' issues and concerns, then maybe we need new lawmakers. After all, ALEC isn't on the ballot -- the men and women representing us in the legislature are.

Race continues to influence state support for public schools

"And Huckleberry walked up to the creek, gazed through the clear water to its craggy bottom and watched minnows dart in teams between brownish rocks in its bed. He surveyed the width of it from this bank to the other, and turned left and right to see where its gurgling length had come from and was going to. A stem of hay still pinched in his teeth and pointing from the corner of his mouth, he exhaled and said aloud to himself, "It's a creek, by gum. 'Taint nothing but a creek, an' if I's to lay down and take me a nap, it'd still be a creek when I'd git up. Yep, that's a creek."

Such is the obviousness of a creek to anyone pausing to observe it. A creek defies denial.

It is likewise with the matter of race as an influence on South Carolina's historical commitment to support public education: Yesterday, it was true that race was an influence that led our decision-makers to discount state support for the institution. Today, it is true again. And tomorrow, when we rouse from our dreaming, it will still be true -- unless a wondrous work is wrought so quickly in the night.

Still, once in a while, it bears putting down in ink on paper -- so that future generations may unearth and review how slowly did we come to join the modern world -- that voices did rise full-throatedly in support of public education but that those voices were too few for too long, and that the baggage of generations dragged backward the mass of ourselves four or five steps for every one we managed to struggle forward.

So we should thank National Journal for its effort, in the current edition, to point the attention to the nation, again, to quaint South Carolina. Beloved South Carolina. Enchanted South Carolina. Enshrouded South Carolina. Backward South Carolina.

Journalist Ronald Brownstein, here last week to capture firsthand the circus, captured also some observations on the qualities that haunt our present and stymie our collective future. No, his report is not a review of Governor Nikki Haley's first year; it goes much further than that. Titled "The Color Line," it tells ugly truth.

COLUMBIA, S.C.—Race is no longer as overt a factor in South Carolina politics as it was when Strom Thurmond, who is memorialized in a statue looming over the state Capitol complex here, quit the Democratic Party for the GOP after Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Yet race remains embedded in the state’s political DNA. The role of race in South Carolina politics has moved far beyond the civil-rights era’s questions of explicit discrimination. Today, whether openly discussed or not, race is central to the clash between Democrats and Republicans over taxes and spending. In that way, far more than in the days of the backlash against integration, the state previews what national politics will increasingly resemble if it continues along its current trajectory.

Say it ain't so. An entire nation that reflects our dire statistics? Hope would be lost.

The dominant fact of South Carolina politics is racial polarization. In the 2008 general election, Barack Obama won 96 percent of the state’s African-American vote, but John McCain carried 73 percent of its white voters. That wasn’t an anomaly rooted in Obama’s race: In 2004, George W. Bush won an even higher percentage of the state’s white voters (78) against John Kerry.

And in the 2010 governor’s race, Indian-American Nikki Haley carried 70 percent of whites in the Republican’s narrow victory over Vincent Sheheen, a centrist white Democratic state senator. Sheheen, meanwhile, won 94 percent of the black vote. In Saturday’s critical GOP presidential primary, whites will likely cast more than 95 percent of the ballots (although they represent only about two-thirds of the state’s population).

Brownstein seems to be making a point. It's just a guess, but I'll give it a try and say that progressives vote for Democratic candidates and conservatives vote for Republicans.

Was that not his point? Did I miss it?

Sometimes the two parties in South Carolina collide over issues that directly inflame racial tensions, as they did in 2000 over the display of the Confederate flag. The legislation that Haley signed last May toughening voter-identification requirements -- which the Obama Justice Department has moved to block as racially discriminatory -- has produced similar, if less explosive, collisions.

The flag, the flag -- why, o why, was that thing ever pieced together and tied to a stick in the first place? When, o when, will we be able to take the wretched thing down and move past it? It's already been a century and half since it lost any meaning at all. Are we that slow? Must it take another century? Or two? Are we doomed -- doomed? -- to spin out this insipid tale again and again and again until our tongues lose taste in our mouths, until the colors drain from the earth and sky, until all sounds fade out of cacophony into a dull, flat moan?

Must the entire state die and be lowered into a red clay grave of our own digging, with that ragged flag draped over us all into the ground? Is that what it will take?

Brownstein goes on:

But mostly, racial conflicts in state politics now play out through the parties’ differences over the role of government. African-Americans and other minorities overwhelmingly believe that they need an activist government investing in services, such as education, job training, and health care, to help them ascend into the middle class. Most of South Carolina’s whites are comfortable with a governing model that limits taxes while investing far less than most states in public services. “There is a fundamental difference in attitudes about the role of government between whites and African-Americans,” says veteran South Carolina GOP strategist Warren Tompkins.

Of course there is, and that fundamental difference clawed its way out of its own womb on Oyster Point -- the very first site of Charlestonians' footsteps on colonial soil -- and has dragged itself forward through the ages.

It says, this fundamental difference: I - I - I will have the choicest part of this life for myself and my progeny, while YOU - YOU - YOU will have the least and last parts of it for yourself and yours. And to the extent that I - I - I can deprive YOU - YOU - YOU from having any part of life that resembles what is mine, I shall heave and groan to make certain of it, all the days of my life, and the days of my sons' lives, and their sons' lives, and so on and so on, down through eternity, to the gaping maw of the last grave.

At least, that is one interpretation of what Tompkins told Brownstein. Other interpretations may be equally valid.

The Republican skepticism about government here, as in Washington, manifests most importantly as unwavering opposition to new taxes. Resisting tax increases “is the one issue that unifies Republicans,” says GOP state Sen. John Courson. “It is the chewing gum, or glue, that keeps Republicans together.” Courson, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, acknowledges that commitment to low taxes comes with a cost, particularly for the state’s public-school students, nearly half of whom are now minorities. “The revenue stream has not been there to adequately fund public or higher education in South Carolina,” he says flatly.

We cannot afford it. We cannot afford it.

We can afford many things, many other things, many things that might not benefit everyone, but this we cannot afford.

We can afford corporate tax cuts -- we MUST afford corporate tax cuts -- but this, we cannot afford.

It's a matter of not being able to afford it.

But, like others in his party, Courson argues that the answer is not to increase revenue but to trim waste in the education system and to find savings elsewhere, particularly in Medicaid for the poor.

(Crickets.)

As Obama does nationally, Democrats in South Carolina offer the counterargument that the state cannot attract good-paying jobs without investing more in education, training, and infrastructure. That case helped Sheheen unexpectedly win the state Chamber of Commerce’s endorsement in the gubernatorial race last year.

Yet in pressing that argument, Democrats face two huge headwinds among South Carolina’s whites. One is the enduring belief that too many government programs benefit the indolent—a group that in many minds is disproportionately composed of minorities. “It’s all race, it’s just that simple,” says John Land, the (white) state Senate Democratic leader. The second problem is a sharp rightward shift among white seniors, who see little personal benefit in the education or infrastructure investments that Democrats favor. “They feel differently about paying taxes for kids they don’t have anymore,” says Democratic state Rep. William Clyburn, who chairs the legislative black caucus.

Or, "I paid for mine up north. I won't pay for theirs down here. Pass the marmalade, Gladys, tee-time's in a half-hour."

In all these ways, the state crystallizes the dynamics shaping the national debate. National polls show that amid tough times, most whites (especially older and blue-collar whites) are hardening in skepticism of government, while most minorities continue to view it as essential to their opportunity. Mitt Romney presents that backlash as opposition to an “entitlement society,” but that’s too broad. Surveys indicate that most Republicans (particularly the white seniors flocking to the party) are adamant about preserving the biggest entitlements, Social Security and Medicare; what they oppose is transfer payments to people they view as undeserving.

Remember this from the early spasms of the Tea Party in 2009: "Don't steal from Medicare to support socialized medicine." And the disbelieving, confused look in the eyes when you explained that Medicare is, in fact, socialized medicine?

It has always been about yours versus mine. We in South Carolina just hang onto old, dead tropes a lot longer than others. The list of examples is long.

It’s that sentiment Newt Gingrich stokes when he derides Obama as “the food-stamp president.” It almost doesn’t matter whether Gingrich is deliberately sending coded racial signals. As long as the argument between the parties revolves so centrally around government’s role -- and whites and minorities divide so sharply in their attitudes toward governmental activism -- the racial polarization that defines South Carolina politics will increasingly drive our national campaigns as well.

Don't mind my humming.

I believe the children are our future.
Teach them well and let them lead the way.

Lies, logic, and changing the rules when it's convenient

South Carolina's lawmakers like to say that we spend upwards of $10,000, $11,000, maybe more than $12,000 per student to educate children attending our public schools. They like to say it because it sounds spectacular and makes us look like we're spending money like water on a bloated, wasteful school system. The average citizen doesn't know the difference, so our electeds get to play both sides of the question, depending on their audience, saying, (a) See, we're downright foolish, we spend so much on our little ones and their fancy schools, or (b) See, we're downright foolish, spending too much on other people's little ones and their fancy schools.

Fact is, when the legislature left for home two weeks ago -- before Governor Nikki Haley demanded they return to pass her political agenda -- they were satisfied to spend only $1,617 per child from our state's treasury. That's roughly what we spent during Bill Clinton's second term, a truly pathetic and paltry sum for a state that pretends to support public education.

Yes, "pretends" is the perfectly correct word to use, when a state legislature funds public schools at so low a rate that districts cannot afford to keep a school's doors open and the lights on without issuing general obligation bonds to pay local basic school expenses.

Yet here we have another perfect example of the ineffectiveness -- or malevolence, for it must be one or the other -- of our General Assembly: When local delegations adopted local legislation granting school districts permission to do exactly this -- issue bonds to pay for operating expenses -- Haley vetoed those bills.

And now those lawmakers, representing three school districts, find themselves begging their colleagues for support to override Haley's vetoes. It is literally a matter of whether or not districts will be able to pay their bills through the summer and fall.

Sen. Clementa Pinckney is one of them, and his local newspaper in Bluffton noted his case in yesterday's edition:

Calling it his last local priority before the S.C. General Assembly finishes its work this summer, Sen. Clementa Pinckney is trying to save a bill that Hampton County school officials say will ease their budgetary crisis.

At issue is whether school districts should be allowed to issue general obligation bonds as a way to pay for operating expenses.

In Hampton County's case, officials say they need that option to offset lost stimulus money, Education Finance Act funds and future budget cuts. The alternative, according to Pinckney's bill, is to lay off teachers and staff, raise class sizes and and cut programs.

The Democrat's proposal, S. 877, is similar to Rep. Kenneth Hodges' bill, H. 4149, for Colleton County School District, and Sen. John Land's legislation, S. 785, for Florence County School District No. 4.

All were passed by local delegations, vetoed by the governor, and raised last week for an override by local senators. Traditionally with such bills, the rest of the 46-member body does not cast a vote.

But last week the three bills ran into intense objections from Sen. Greg Ryberg, R-Aiken, Sen. Chip Campsen, R-Charleston, and others.

"This is something that really does have a statewide implication on all the taxpayers in the state," said Campsen. "You don't incur debt to pay current operating expenses. That's like using your home as an ATM."

Notice that bit in the middle: "Traditionally with such bills, the rest of the 46-member body does not cast a vote." Yet two senators, neither of whom lives in the districts asking for this option: Hampton County, Colleton County or Florence County, raised objections and went on to orate with gusto on behalf of their party leader's position.

Why? Had not similar legislation been passed before, giving local districts the right to band-aid the wounds left gaping by the legislature?

Legislative records show that since 2003, six other similar bills passed into law, either by a local delegation's veto override or by the governor allowing the bill to pass without signing it.

They include school districts in Sumter, York, Orangeburg, Kershaw, Lee and Clarendon.

The newspaper asked Pinckney to speculate why his colleagues ignored the chamber's vaunted polity in this instance.

"I assume there may be some political things. Maybe there's blood in the water, and people are looking at it from a purely philosophical standpoint, just to make a point," said the Jasper County senator, who also represents Hampton County.

"I don't believe in making philosophical points. I am dealing with reality. Right now I have districts that are hurting," he added.

Just a day earlier, columnist Cindi Ross Scoppe of The State weighed in on the matter -- and sided with Haley.

Scoppe's argument was that the system itself -- rules that allow local delegations to pass single-county bills -- is "one of the most enduring and destructive vestiges of the Legislative state." Fair enough and maybe, but this is what we have instead of a conscientious legislature.

Supporters say the districts are in crisis and must make disastrous cuts without this admittedly irresponsible funding mechanism. The governor says the funding mechanism is fiscal folly and shouldn’t be allowed regardless of the consequences.

I agree with the governor, although the districts do need help that the state has failed to provide. But the debate is not simply about whether such an extraordinary remedy is justified; it is about whether state legislators finally will accept their responsibility to act as state legislators.

Scoppe is a knowledgeable columnist and keeps the attention of lawmakers with her incisive logic; that logic has caused legislators -- former Speaker David Wilkins was one -- to call her out by name from the podium or the chamber floor.

But that's the very problem. Logic is appropriately applied where logic is respected. This is South Carolina, where logic is no more than a political tool, used for some tasks and not for others, depending on who may be helped or hurt.

Scoppe writes:

By tradition, the only people who vote on a single-county bill are the legislators from that county. Except for school bills, they’re almost always unconstitutional. The single-county school bills are simply bad policy, because they buttress our practice of writing different rules for different districts, and prevent the Legislature from making the reforms we need to improve public education. The most obvious example is school district consolidation, which would benefit our state in countless ways; the Legislature refuses to order it because most legislators consider the districts to be the sole province of the legislators who represent them.

But when it became clear Thursday that local senators would override the governor’s vetoes, tea-party senators revolted, insisting that it was not only their right but their responsibility to weigh in. Sens. Kevin Bryant and Shane Martin said they should vote to uphold the vetoes because the bills would affect their constituents who own property in the districts. Sen. Mike Rose said the bills went far beyond such traditional single-district topics as changing selection methods for school boards and pushed the Legislature onto a dangerously slippery slope that eventually would lead to exempting certain districts from, say, state student-teacher ratios. “At what point,” he asked, “are we going to step in and say, ‘you can’t do that’?”

Senate President Pro Tempore Glenn McConnell said the bills likely wouldn’t be considered constitutionally acceptable school laws because they made findings in the name of the Legislature and exempted the districts from state law.

The most surprising thing about the debate was who championed the divine rights of local legislators: Senate Rules Chairman Larry Martin, who warned his colleagues to be careful what they did unto others, lest the same things be done unto them: “I want you to stay out of my business in Pickens County, and I’m gonna stay out of yours.”

The fact that this perversion of the Golden Rule would be enunciated by one of the most responsible senators demonstrates just how deeply ingrained the idea remains that the Legislature should control all aspects of life in South Carolina.

And it illustrates my point, while little children continue to get by on state investments of $1,617 each.

What Constitution did Nikki Haley swear to uphold?

Why does South Carolina's present governor not support the public education system established in the South Carolina Constitution, the very Constitution she swore to protect and defend in her oath of office? Since taking her office in January, she has missed no opportunity to undermine, dismiss and promote alternatives to the system that serves more than 90 percent of South Carolina's school-age children.

And today's newspapers bring word that as lawmakers debate how to divide up a small windfall in unanticipated tax revenues, Haley has issued a veto threat if the legislature spends that money on our public schools. She demands instead that these funds be used, at best, to pay down state debt or otherwise to be refunded to taxpayers in the form of tax cuts.

It is, to put it generously, difficult to understand why a governor so despises the hundreds of thousands of children who attend public schools that she would withhold state funds from them, especially when the vast majority of lawmakers are willing to invest of the futures of those children.

And this is not a single veto threat, but a blanket veto threat in all future instances when the Board of Economic Advisors revises upward its revenue projections and additional funds become available.

Haley also said that, in the future, anytime a three-member panel of state economists increases its estimates of how much money the state will bring in, as it did last month, that money should go for tax cuts, rebates or to pay off state debt.

That position is certain to endear Haley to her Tea Party supporters, who say they are taxed enough already.

But it will upset others who say that, after cutting billions from the state’s general fund during the just-ended Great Recession, recovering state revenues should be used to restore services that were cut or can justify more support.

At present, the BEA calculates that the state has an additional $210 million above the earlier estimates that lawmakers used to draft their initial budget.

The Senate added $105 million for K-12 funding and $100 million to help businesses pay off nearly $1 billion in federal loans that the state took out to be able to continue paying jobless benefits after the state’s unemployment fund went bust. Some businesses saw their unemployment insurance bills increase six-fold after lawmakers voted to raise rates to repay the federal loans.

The House earmarked $146 million for business tax relief and added $55 million to K-12 funding. House members argued providing businesses more tax relief might encourage them to hire more employees.

Haley made it clear she does not like the Senate spending plan.

“If you’re not giving it in tax relief, if you’re not giving it to pay down the debt, you send it back to the taxpayers – that’s where it belongs,” Haley said.

If we follow that philosophy to its ultimate end, it means that once the state debt is entirely paid off, then the state government would cease to exist, having been gradually and completely de-funded.

It seems to suggest that Haley has a yet-undisclosed version of the South Carolina Constitution that tells her which state obligations and institutions are "core functions" and which are not. The version available to the public clearly establishes a system of free public schools, meant to be accessible by all of South Carolina's children, and this is the one to which she swore an oath to uphold in January.

By employing her line-item veto, Haley could make it much more difficult for lawmakers to increase state spending, deleting added money.

“From now, going forward, whenever money falls from that money tree – and it does every year – it’s not ‘Where do we spend it and how do we spend it?’ It’s ’Give it back to the taxpayer,’ ” she said.

Haley said she will target her budget vetoes at “anything that’s not that core function of government,” including ETV public television and radio, and the state Arts Commission. Asked if her target list of non-core functions included K-12 education, Haley responded only that the House found a way to balance its budget proposal without the additional money.

Are there, in fact, two versions of our state Constitution -- one for the governor, and one for the people?

Thankfully, someone else is asking questions about Haley's motives and veto threats.

But Senate Minority Leader John Land, D-Clarendon, said the state is not meeting its obligations for education and health care, having cut its budget from $7.3 billion in 2008 to $5.1 billion for the fiscal year that ends June 30.

Land recited a list of tax breaks approved by the state in the last decade, including the $100 million in unemployment tax relief to businesses, property tax relief, and business and personal income tax cuts. House lawmakers estimate they have cut $20 billion in taxes since Republicans took control of that body in 1995.

“You have too many needs that are going unmet,” Land said. “South Carolina has been very, very good as far as giving back to the taxpayer.”

All of which is further evidence that elections have consequences.