By Andy Brack, editor and publisher | For all the people who wax on and on about the need for legislative term limits, consider this:
Next year’s state Senate will be a shadow of its former self. Not only will there be eight new state senators in the 46-member chamber, but if you look at who is not there compared to a few years back, you’ll realize how much the body will change.
Since 2011 when Gov. Nikki Haley was inaugurated, just under half of the state Senate will have turned over by the time next year’s session starts. Of the 46 senators in office in 2011, 22 will be gone next year, including three prominent chairs who lost in June elections — Judiciary Chair Larry Martin, R-Pickens; Banking and Finance Chair Wes Hayes, R-Rock Hill; and Corrections and Penology Chair Mike Fair, R-Greenville.
Go back a little more — to when President George Bush started his second term — and you’ll discover than only a third of senators who were in office in 2005 will take seats in the Senate chamber next year. Yep, 31 different senators will be in seats in 2017 compared to just 12 years — three Senate election cycles — earlier.
Gone are powerhouses like former Senate President pro tems Glenn McConnell, now College of Charleston president, and John Drummond of Ninety Six. Gone are workhorses like Phil Leventis of Sumter, Tom Moore of Aiken and David Thomas of Greenville. Gone are controversial figures like Robert Ford of Charleston and Jake Knotts of Lexington. In addition to the loss of Hayes, Martin and Fair, next year also will see replacements for firebrand Lee Bright of Roebuck and hard-working members Joel Lourie of Columbia and Paul Thurmond of Charleston.
It will be, noted former Democratic Senate leader John Land of Manning, a much different place Not only will there be a lot of new faces, but there will be a big shift in Senate leadership.
“You’ve had a bigger turnover in leadership than I can ever recall,” he said recently. “At the top before, change was always very gradual and gentle as far as replacements were concerned.”
Next year, some names will be familiar as veterans who will return including Democrats Brad Hutto and John Matthews, both of Orangeburg, Vincent Sheheen of Camden and Nikki Setzler of Lexington, as well as Republicans John Courson of Columbia, Larry Grooms of Daniel Island, Harvey Peeler of Gaffney and Danny Verdin of Laurens.
State Sen. Hugh Leatherman, the Florence Republican who fought off an inter-party challenge fueled by money from a Haley political action committee, will continue to be the chamber’s most powerful figure as head of the Finance Committee and president pro tem.
But another Haley target, Luke Rankin of Conway, will take over the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will leave an opportunity for someone to take over the Ethics Committee he currently chairs. And then there will be new chairs for committees dealing with banking and corrections.
Over the last two decades of interacting with leaders across the state, we’ve been fortunate to meet people like Larry Martin, Wes Hayes and Mike Fair. It’s kind of hard to imagine them not being in the middle of the legislative process. We’ll miss Martin, with his gentle manner, patience, candor and willingness to answer any question, and Hayes for his quiet, hard-working demeanor and common decency. And while we didn’t always agree with some of Fair’s conservative positions, we appreciated how he listened and didn’t shy away from describing what he believed.
Yes, the Senate has changed in the last 12 years. Once the domain of where some ideas just went to die or to be talked to death, it also once served as a check to the hot-headedness of the S.C. House of Representatives and often made other ideas better and more stable. These days, it has become more like the House of old, moving forward with less reflection, more reaction.
Let’s hope new faces will take their jobs seriously to do what is best for the state by incorporating the best of the past — genuine consideration of the merits and demerits of proposals — and forgoing some of the career-building soapboxing that’s become all too common.
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