Here is your State House Dispatch for the week.
Abortion petition
Last year South Carolina lawmakers passed an extreme abortion ban, S. 474, that bans abortions before most people even know they are pregnant. Now that the State Supreme Court has allowed the ban to go into effect, it is endangering the lives and liberty of pregnant people.
We recently launched a petition demanding a repeal of the abortion ban to demonstrate a basic fact: Abortion bans are widely unpopular no matter the state, and our lawmakers are not acting in the interests of their constituents.
Please add your name to the petition at the affiliate link below, via our coalition partners at Planned Parenthood Votes! South Atlantic:
Private school vouchers and your civil liberties
Lawmakers are barreling ahead with H. 5164, a bill that would expand a private school voucher program before it even begins in the fall of 2024. We anticipate it could see debate on the House floor as early as Wednesday, March 20.
The “Education Scholarship Trust Fund,” established last year after decades of lobbying from out-of-state school privatization groups, is currently facing a challenge in the South Carolina Supreme Court because it violates the state constitution’s prohibition on public funding of private and religious schools.
Among the important amendments to existing law, H. 5164 would eliminate income caps on households receiving the vouchers. It would also eliminate a requirement that vouchers go to students who previously attended a public school. Similar policies have led other states to subsidize the private education of wealthy families.
As always, we oppose the voucher program and its expansion on civil-liberties grounds. Public funding of private schools is a recipe for discrimination on the basis of religion, sexuality, and disability.
Budget shenanigans
Last week during budget deliberations in the South Carolina House of Representatives, we saw hard-right lawmakers attempting to use the power of the state to enforce their beliefs about sex, gender, and healthcare. This time, rather than go through the lawmaking process, they introduced budget provisos, which are one-year rules that limit how public agencies can spend state funding.
Here are just a few of the provisos that were proposed last week:
- A proviso from Rep. Josiah Magnuson (R-Campobello) directing the Department of Health and Human Services to reject federal funds for family planning.
- A proviso from Rep. Donald McCabe (R-Lexington) requiring the Department of Social Services to place children in group homes according to biological sex.
- A proviso from Reps. Magnuson and McCabe removing the exceptions for rape and incest from the state’s abortion ban law.
For once, we got some good news: Proviso after proviso was shot down. Other lawmakers pointed out that these provisos were not germane to the budget and were, in effect, attempts to legislate without going to the trouble of passing a law.
As we’ve mentioned before on the blog, the tactic of legislating by budget proviso is hardly new. Lawmakers used provisos to ban mask mandates during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and are using Proviso 1.82 in the current budget to ban classroom discussions that make students feel “discomfort.”
What’s new, and what’s refreshing, is the fact that the latest round of harmful budget provisos fell flat on their face. More of this, please.
An anti-SLAPP bill
One bill up for consideration this week would help protect South Carolinians’ right to free speech: H. 4274, the SC Public Expression Protection Act.
This bill makes it possible for people to recover their legal fees when they are targeted by a type of lawsuit known as a SLAPP. Here’s how the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law defines a SLAPP:
Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP suit) refers to lawsuits brought by individuals and entities to dissuade their critics from continuing to produce negative publicity. By definition, SLAPP suits do not have any true legal claims against the critics. People bring SLAPP suits because they can either temporarily prevent their critics from making public statements against them or more commonly to make critics spend all of their time and resources defending the SLAPP suits.
One of the most infamous SLAPPs in modern times came in 1996 amid widespread news coverage of mad cow disease. A group of Texas cattle ranchers sued Oprah Winfrey after she said on air that she had stopped eating burgers. The case was ultimately thrown out.
South Carolina is one of 17 states without an anti-SLAPP law on the books, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. H. 4274 would enable citizens to challenge SLAPP suits and recover the expenses of their legal defense.
The bill will receive a hearing from the House Judiciary Committee Constitutional Laws Subcommittee on Tuesday, March 18 at about 2:30 p.m. in Room 516 of the Blatt Building.
