By Andy Brack | There are always theatrics during the state’s annual budget process, but most of the time they seem limited to a minority party desperately trying to be heard so that the majority doesn’t completely get its way.
It was like that 30 years ago when the Democrats controlled the House and has mostly been like that since Republicans took charge. But this year as lawmakers debated a $13.2 budget that is $600 million less than last year’s spending, a toothless beast that’s mostly been quiet rose to grab attention. A handful of House legislators in the uber-conservative House Freedom Caucus took on the Republican establishment, which flicked away two dozen hot-button social policy proposals with the help of minority Democrats.
Freedom Caucus zealots yammered their prepared talking points. They hemmed. They hawed. They spewed forth on everything from freezing higher education tuition to film incentives to how to pay deputies. Mostly, they whined the state shouldn’t do a lot of things it does because those functions were outside of the “core functions of government.”
For example, they didn’t want the budget to freeze tuition again at state colleges and universities to keep down costs for working families so their kids could afford to go to college. That, they said in their best libertarian fashion, was little more than a subsidized way for government to interfere in the marketplace.
Fortunately, most people in the legislature simply said, “Hold on. You don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
That’s because South Carolinians have a core belief that higher education is important in a state with a plantation history. Taxpayers believe in an American dream that if they work hard enough, then they’ll be able to send their kids to college with the expectation that their children will have a better life. The only way most can afford this path is if the tuition gets some help from the state. [Side note: State investment in education these days is in single digits of total cost, while it used to be in double digits three decades ago.]
So this Freedom Caucus attack on higher education is an attack on the economic model that’s the state’s backbone – that by increasing the education level of people in South Carolina, it will attract better jobs that will pay more and allow people to live better. That’s not a Democratic or Republican value. That’s an American value.
“Public education is a core function of government,” said Republican Rep. Micah Caskey, R-Lexington. “There is clearly a balancing of what has to happen. It exists on a spectrum on what level of funding the balance has to be shared between the individual and the public. And we do that now. We’ve existed with this tension for hundreds of years.”
More to the point, Caskey highlights how today’s high-tech jobs require more than just a high school education.
“It’s really hard to engineer automobiles and airplanes without engineers in your state,” he noted.
In the end, what this week’s two-day House budget debate – which was way less frenetic and tense than in previous years – showcased was that the state’s establishment leaders didn’t cotton to the talking points prepared in the best think tanks outside of South Carolina. They didn’t put much value in a group that one observer likened to a “a bunch of people who have proven themselves to be unserious actors and attention seekers.”
On a higher level, what’s really interesting is that the political tool of constant attention-seeking is the tactic constantly used by someone endorsed by most of the Republican caucus – former President Donald Trump.
What would be really fun – and illuminating – would be to find out what the same Republicans who brushed away the Freedom Caucus really think of Trump and his antics while they’re kowtowing to his political will because they’re worried about getting a primary challenge in the next election.
But there are some secrets that remain hidden, even in Columbia.
Andy Brack is editor and publisher of Statehouse Report and the Charleston City Paper. Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com.
We Can Do Better, South Carolina!
If they vote for Biden, I promise I won’t tell on them.
I understand that this year’s budget is less than last year’s due to money for the Scout plant that was in last year’s dollars.
Otherwise, spending has gone up.