COVID-19 will take up SC lawmakers’ 2021 focus. But here’s what else is on the table
No doubt remains to anyone who will walk through the doors of the State House in 2021 that South Carolina’s COVID-19 outbreak, the state’s response to it and the virus’ residual impacts on the state’s economy will occupy much of the focus of the General Assembly’s attention when lawmakers return Tuesday.
But the Legislature also plans in the new year to take on a handful of hotly contested debates that will steal some of the spotlight: on education, the budget, police and criminal justice reform, Santee Cooper’s future, abortion and, potentially, medical marijuana.
One of the more emotional debates will be redistricting, the process by which lawmakers draw district lines based on the U.S. Census numbers expected to be released next month.
The debate will be especially tough for Democrats, who lost seats in November, giving Republicans more control over an issue where they could make districts less competitive.
How the Legislature draws the map will trigger court challenges. However, lawmakers will want to resolve those matters before 2022 when every seat in the state House is up for election.
Republican state Rep. Chris Murphy, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, said last week he expects the debate to start toward the middle to end of the legislative work calendar that officially ends early May.
“But once we get on that, we’ll be focused on that the remainder of the year,” said Murphy, of Dorchester.
To try to remain at work, all 46 state senators have agreed to wear masks inside the chamber. No agreement exists in the House, but House Speaker Jay Lucas, R-Darlington, has strongly encouraged mask-wearing and social distancing for all 124 members.
Thursday on a legislative call with reporters, House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford, D-Richland, said the House should have a mask rule, and Murphy said he wouldn’t oppose one but predicted a rule may be imposed to ensure members wear masks around staff.
Leaders also hope to have on-site COVID-19 testing available to lawmakers, and the Legislature plans to restrict public access, in part, opening the balconies to mostly legislators and pausing invitations to sports teams, for example.
The virus is “going to be the front and center the whole time. We have to figure out the best way to live and work with it being front and center,” said Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, R-Edgefield. “It’s extremely important that the Legislature be present. We can’t take months off like we did in 2020.”
Here are some potentially big debates to watch in the Legislature this year:
Budget, education
The Legislature will need to write a new budget after COVID-19 disrupted plans last year.
The expectation from state economists Thursday is the state will have close to $1.2 billion to spend, though much of that is one-time money — roughly $988 million — that can’t be spent on yearly pay raises, for example. Only $182 million so far has been set aside for recurring dollars, and a majority of that will cover health costs for state employees and Medicaid recipients.
Last year, House Ways and Means chairman Murrell Smith, R-Sumter, told The State COVID-19 had wreaked havoc on the state’s money pot, calling it “premature” to address spending requests while the virus’ threat on the economy remains.
But Republicans and Democrats are already eyeing the requests they will get from education leaders, particularly teachers who missed out on another pay raise because of COVID-19 and have demanded lawmakers unfreeze their yearly salary step increases.
“Certainly that would be ideal,” state Sen. Thomas Alexander, R-Oconee, told reporters Thursday.
Lawmakers also suggest they may need to spend more money to get students back in the classroom five days a week.
Before COVID-19, Republican leaders tried to push through a House-proposed, multi-page omnibus education bill that stalled for eight weeks in the Senate because of a Democrat-led filibuster and only went to the House right before the virus paused legislative work.
House education chairwoman Rita Allison, R-Spartanburg, told The State that House Republicans have looked through the bill to send pieces of it back to the floor, including changes to state testing, giving it a better chance of passage.
Allison also predicted South Carolinians will see more school choice legislation, and she said the Legislature will have to find ways to provide incentives to encourage teacher recruitment and retention, which would include bringing their step raises back.
“We don’t want to incentivize them to retire,” Allison said. “We want to incentivize them to stay in the classroom.”
Solving the state’s education issues will not be easy, longtime lawmakers say.
“Education is one of those that is such a large priority and it’s such a huge issue that you could spend another six months dealing with it and trying to tackle all the issues and still not get there,” Rutherford, who serves on the House’s budget-writing committee, told The State this month. “I’ve been in the General Assembly since 1998, (and) education has always been one of my priorities, and it has always been one of the most vexing issues that we deal with.”
Law enforcement, justice reforms and hate crime bill
Law enforcement reform and adopting comprehensive hate crime legislation are among the top priorities for members of the Legislative Black Caucus, longstanding initiatives members have devoted their efforts to inside the chambers for years.
And state Rep. Pat Henegan, D-Marlboro, incoming chairwoman of the Legislative Black Caucus, said she is hopeful such legislation will pass “without any problems” despite the onslaught of emergent issues that all seemingly take precedence during a time in state government where lawmakers are playing catch-up due to the restrictions and previous pause on legislative processes due to the pandemic.
A bipartisan effort toward reform already has taken shape as an 18-member panel of lawmakers — the House Equitable Justice System and Law Enforcement Reform Committee commissioned by House Speaker Lucas and chaired by the House majority and minority leaders — has already met to address four critical areas of criminal justice reform: police training, tactics, standards and accountability; civil asset forfeiture; the criminal process and procedure and sentencing reform.
“We had 269 pre-filed bills that were assigned to judiciary,” Murphy said. “Those bills will take a priority.”
On the law enforcement side, Massey told reporters Thursday many believe changes need to be made.
“I think law enforcement will tell you that. They need some help and support in training and helping making it a more professional force,” Massey said. “We need to support the good guys and get the bad guys out of there.”
Santee Cooper
The Legislature’s debate over Santee Cooper has the possibility to again suck oxygen out of the room, some lawmakers say.
But those legislators also predict that, with everything else on the table and a faction of members souring on selling the the state’s electric utility, it will be tough to move forward.
“If this weren’t a pandemic year then yeah, it will probably be very high” on the priority list, Senate Minority Leader Brad Hutto, D-Orangeburg, told The State. “Others may try and make it high, but it’s so time consuming to get involved in that and kind of shut down the rest of the calendar. That’d be up to the majority whether they want to do that or not.”
COVID-19 and the General Assembly’s split on what to do with the state’s debt-riddled public utility has shoved the company’s future into question.
On one side of the state Capitol in the House, leaders there have largely been more unified, recently pushing a proposal to reopen negotiations to sell Santee Cooper to Florida-based utility giant NextEra and overhaul Santee Cooper’s management.
“Either Santee Cooper’s leadership is incapable or dishonest. In either case, they need to go,” House Speaker Lucas said in a committee meeting last week.
But it is the Senate that is split into two camps.
Last month, Senate Finance chairman Hugh Leatherman, R-Florence, created a new subcommittee that didn’t outright say it would move to sell, though the panel’s acronym — SCRAP — gives the sense there is a chance they would move at minimum to overhaul the utility. And soon after, powerful Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Luke Rankin, R-Horry, created a new committee filled with members critical of NextEra.
“I’m really concerned about Santee Cooper’s recognition of what the real issues are and their willingness to make changes that are necessary to address those issues,” Massey told reporters Thursday. “The longer this goes on, the less comfortable I am with Santee Cooper’s ability to fix its own problems.”
This, Massey said, may have started with V.C. Summer, the nuclear reactor plant project in Fairfield County that Santee Cooper and what was then Cayce-based SCANA Corp., now Dominion, abandoning a few years ago.
“V.C. Summer just gave us the reason to look under the hood,” Massey said. “We looked under the hood. The problems at Santee Cooper are much more pervasive than just V.C. Summer.”
Medical marijuana
South Carolina could be poised to join more than 30 states over the next two years and OK medical marijuana use.
State Sen. Tom Davis, R-Beaufort, one of the Legislature’s most vocal advocates, has been pushing for the debate for the past seven years and told The State he thinks there are enough votes in the Senate to pass it.
“It’s really well vetted at this standpoint,” Davis said. “We’ve listened to the concerns of law enforcement and doctors and other health care experts, and I think we have a fairly mature bill at this point in time. We’ve got 36 states that have legalized cannabis for medical purposes now. There is zero correlation between states that have legalized it for medical use and an increase in recreational use. There’s just empirically that particular fear is unfounded.”
Davis has found allies in the debate, including Senate Finance chairman Leatherman, who is one of 15 cosponsors on Davis’ bill, S. 150. Senate Majority Leader Massey, who is not listed as a cosponsor, told The State he’s open to marijuana use for medical purposes but wants more information about how it will be implemented before he signs on.
“It’s hard to deny people a useful treatment if both they and their doctor believe it could be a useful treatment,” Massey said.
And across the State House, state Rep. Bill Herbkersman, R-Beaufort, has filed a companion bill, H. 3361.
“I really am 100% behind that deal,” said incoming Black Caucus chairwoman Henegan, who stressed she wants to make sure racial minorities are neither negatively impacted or overlooked during the debate.
“Anytime we begin something, I just want to make sure that they don’t forget that there are minorities out there that are also growing hemp and they have a right to make sure that it is not just taken over by a select few people,” Henegan said. “Consider them, too.”
Reporter Joseph Bustos contributed to this report.
This story was originally published January 11, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "COVID-19 will take up SC lawmakers’ 2021 focus. But here’s what else is on the table."
