- BIG STORY: N. Charleston lawsuit tests federal separation of powers
- MORE NEWS: S.C. House advances pared-down anti-DEI bill
- LOWCOUNTRY, Ariail: Intrepid delegation
- BRACK: Would your grandma put up with this mess?
- MYSTERY PHOTO: Rusty bridge
- FEEDBACK: Send us your thoughts
N. Charleston suit tests U.S. separation of powers
By Jack O’Toole, Capitol Bureau | A South Carolina nonprofit is suing the Trump administration in a major case that legal experts say could soon put North Charleston at the center of a raging national debate over the limits of presidential authority and the constitution’s separation of powers.
The 86-page complaint, filed March 19 in Charleston federal court, alleges the Trump administration violated the U.S. Constitution and several federal statutes when it unilaterally froze congressionally-approved grants for 11 nonprofits and six cities across the country.
North Charleston’s Sustainability Institute, which won an $11.4 million Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant in 2024 to build and rehabilitate affordable homes in the city’s Union Heights neighborhood, is the lead plaintiff in the case.
According to the lawsuit, the Trump administration froze, unfroze and again refroze the institute’s grant in a chaotic and opaque process that began in late January. The governmental funding yo-yo is turning the organization upside down, sources say.
“The Sustainability Institute is honored to have been selected … to deliver critically-needed affordable housing, weatherization and residential retrofits to homes in North Charleston,” Bryan Cordell, executive director of the institute, said in a news release. “Continued freezes and disruptions to our work would be catastrophic to the project.”
The legal stakes
Since taking office in January, Trump has issued a series of executive orders that direct federal officials to dismantle departments, fire civil servants and freeze whole categories of federal spending.
The administration says these steps are necessary to bring federal spending under control, and that the president is acting within his constitutional authority. But many legal scholars say the orders violate the constitution’s carefully constructed system of checks and balances, which gives Congress, not the president, final say over how federal dollars are spent.
And that’s the question at the heart of the Charleston case, according to Chapel Hill, N.C., attorney Kym Meyer, litigation director of the Southern Environmental Law Center, which is representing the plaintiffs.
“Fundamentally, this is about separation of powers,” Meyer told Statehouse Report on March 20. “Congress has the power to decide how our money is spent, and that’s not what’s happening here.”
Or as the lawsuit puts it plainly: “The president’s executive orders, and the program freezing actions implementing those orders, directly contravene Congress’s directives in the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and other statutes to carry out and fund the statutory programs at issue in this case.”
But even with significant legal issues at stake, Meyer brought the conversation back to the real world impacts of Trump’s actions on her clients and the communities they serve.
“We filed this case in Charleston because we have this wonderful client, the Sustainability Institute, that’s doing really important work to improve lives with affordable housing and it’s being prevented from doing that work,” she said. “So while we’re talking about big constitutional issues, the impact is very real to the people on the ground.”
The people on the ground
Almost 60 years ago, the historically Black Union Heights neighborhood was split by the arrival of Exit 218, part of the larger I-26 project connecting Charleston and Columbia.
But when the S.C. Department of Transportation abandoned the exit in favor of the newer Port Access Road, residents saw an opportunity to reknit the community by using the now vacant land for affordable housing.
And that’s what the Sustainability Institute’s Project 218, funded by the EPA grant at issue in the lawsuit, was designed to do.
“This project has been planned with the community for years,” the Sustainability Institute’s Cordell told Statehouse Report. “We’re really excited about getting it done.”
But as Cordell notes, the project is larger than just 10 new units of affordable housing on the former Exit 218 site. It also includes major renovations for 50 other homes in the neighborhood, as well as flooding mitigation and green energy options.
“We want this work to last for generations,” Cordell said. “This project is about the long term resiliency of the community, and that’s why the EPA invested in it.”
North Charleston Mayor Reggie Burgess, who grew up in the Union Heights neighborhood, spoke of the project’s importance at a Feb. 4 groundbreaking event, saying it was “personal” for him.
“We’re at a point in time when we’re reconnecting Union Heights now,” Burgess told the crowd of neighborhood residents. “So, continue to pray hard for this development, because we’re going to make it happen.”
A hearing in the case will be scheduled.
- Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com.
S.C. House advances pared-down anti-DEI bill
By Jack O’Toole, Capitol Bureau | A bill to limit diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in S.C. will move to the S.C. House floor after members removed a ban on state contracts with companies that have DEI programs.
The amended bill, which will soon face debate on the House floor, “says government agencies can’t have an office named with the words that form the DEI acronym and can’t require diversity training or statements,” according to the S.C. Daily Gazette.
In other recent headlines
S.C. public health chief’s confirmation hearing overshadowed by Covid anger. As the first director of South Carolina’s newly organized health agency, Dr. Edward Simmer has a vision of reducing infant mortality, fighting childhood cancers and reducing drug overdoses.
Greenville senator says political move to dissolve trash service is ‘playing games.’ A state bill that would dissolve a public sanitation agency in Greenville County has sparked panic among many of the 60,000 customers who receive trash pickup service from the department.
S.C. House bill aims to regulate ownership of venomous reptiles. An S.C. House panel heard testimony Wednesday on the S.C. Venomous Reptiles Act, which would ban the possession of venomous reptiles without a permit and establish guidelines for their housing and transportation.
S.C. DOGE commission mimics existing oversight committee. When asked how South Carolina’s proposed DOGE Commission would differ from the state’s existing House Government Efficiency and Legislative Oversight Committee, legislators had no answers.
S.C. Senate looks to stiffen penalties for abandoned boats. Under the proposed bill, owners of vessels abandoned in S.C. waterways would face up to $10,000 in fines and 60 days in jail.
Mace facing legal, political hurdles in defamation suit, experts say. A high-profile defamation claim against U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace could pose serious legal and political challenges as the three-term Lowcountry Republican gears up for an expected 2026 gubernatorial run, Palmetto State legal and political experts tell the Charleston City Paper.
Pair of charter school lawsuits target developer. A private charter school management company with two South Carolina campuses is asking a federal judge to declare the state’s largest charter authorizer isn’t legally allowed to sponsor charter schools, a ruling that could threaten the existence of sponsors that oversee schools with tens of thousands of students.
Tort reform gets late night breakthrough in S.C. Senate. The tort reform bill got a late Tuesday night breakthrough after the Senate returned from a multi-hour break with what Senate Republican leadership stated was a “compromise” amendment.
S.C. could expand legal protections for Confederate statues unrelated to war. A senior lawmaker wants to revisit South Carolina’s Heritage Act that protects Confederate and other military monuments, expanding its coverage to memorials that slipped through the cracks.
S.C. lawmaker renews feud with state Aeronautics Commission. A South Carolina lawmaker plans to renew reform efforts at the state Aeronautics Commission after an audit vindicated its board over allegations of illegal political activity by some members.
Intrepid delegation
Award-winning cartoonist Robert Ariail has a special knack for poking a little fun in just the right way. This week, he takes on the state’s courageous Republican congressional delegation.
- Love this week’s cartoon or hate it? Did he go too far, or not far enough? Send your thoughts to feedback@statehousereport.com.
Would your grandma put up with this mess?
By Andy Brack | The title of a bad network sitcom from the 1990s seems to be coming to life in today’s politics.
Men Behaving Badly, on the air for just 15 months on NBC in the mid-1990s, was the offbeat story of two college friends living a second childhood. Based on a six-season British comedy of the same name, the blip of the American version was considered too risque and racy for the day. The series ended in December 1997. A month later, news broke of an alleged affair by President Bill Clinton and an intern, Monica Lewinsky. And that was the scandal that knocked decency guardrails off the political tracks.
The show had nothing to do with politics, but today, public life often seems to be one long episode of Politicians Behaving Badly – as if they continually try to top one appalling behavior with something worse.
Just in the last few days, the state’s budget debate devolved into a discussion involving crap. A congresswoman disparaged some of her constituents. And a state lawmaker felt so violated that he gave an impassioned speech upbraiding White lawmakers for treating Blacks differently.
As reported last week in Statehouse Report, the House budget debate seemed to devolve into a feud between uber-right Freedom Caucus members, who submitted outrageous amendment after outrageous amendment, and more traditional mainstream Republican members. As reported by bureau chief Jack O’Toole:
“Members of the chamber’s Republican supermajority took turns denouncing each other’s proposals as “crap” from the well of the House. ‘Can you say ‘no’ to the budget?’ Freedom Caucus Rep. April Cromer (R-Anderson) demanded. ‘I can, because it’s chock full of crap.’
“The ‘crap’ she was referring to? A billion dollars in so-called “wasteful” state spending that she and her Freedom Caucus colleagues claimed their amendments would cut from the budget.”
The problem: Their amendments weren’t worth anything close to $1 billion in cuts and instead were a tenth the size, which led GOP House Majority Leader Davey Hiott to retort, “I’m sick and tired of this crap, coming up here and making a farce out of what the state of South Carolina deserves and needs. That’s all this is — it’s a show.”
Also during budget discussions during a proposal to cut funding for diversity measures, Black state Rep. Jermaine Johnson, D-Richland, called out hypocrisy that got noticed on social media.
“You don’t like being called racist in here. You hate when we use the word racist,” he said, as highlighted in a YouTube video and reported in Black Enterprise. “You hate being attacked. You hate when we bring up race and everything. But then, when we have an opportunity to show that we’re not racist, you let me down every time.”
In short, it wasn’t a shining budget week for South Carolina. Just like a comment this week by First District GOP U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace didn’t do much to heal. In a minute-long social media rant about how people were calling her office with disruptive, nasty messages (and yes, they were nasty) over her not attending a town hall to which she was invited, she branded some of her constituents as “a**holes.”
“So stop blowing up our lines, stop being a**holes and start letting real people get their calls through.”
Whew. Not what you expect from someone reportedly thinking of running for governor. Most candidates would be trying to build coalitions, not push people away. Calling constituents names seems to be the very epitome of someone who’s tired of public service or is in it for the wrong reasons.
So yes, it’s a time of people behaving badly. Perhaps legislators should use a grandma filter – determine whether they would say or do something as if they were running by their grandmother – before opening their mouths.
Andy Brack is editor and publisher of Statehouse Report and the Charleston City Paper. Have a comment? Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com.
Rusty bridge
A longtime reader sent in this picture of a rusty bridge in South Carolina. Where is it? Bonus: Tell us something about the bridge that you find neat. Send your name, hometown and guess to: feedback@statehousereport.com.
Our most recent mystery, “Sepia tones,” showed a really old picture of Roper Hospital in Charleston, S.C., back in 1861, which Allan Peel of San Antonio, Texas, wrote was the first community hospital in the state.
“Located on the corner of Queen and Logan streets in Charleston, it first opened in 1856 and was named after Colonel Thomas Roper (1760 – 1829), a former mayor of Charleston who left a bequest of $30,000 to the Medical Society of South Carolina (MSSC) to establish a hospital. The funds were to become available to build the hospital only after Colonel Roper’s only son, Robert William Roper (1790 – 1845), passed away, but only if he died ‘without issue.’
“It would seem that Colonel Roper was concerned that his bequest could be used as a motive to target his son’s life! When Robert Roper died ‘without issue’ in 1845, the funds were used to start construction of the hospital. At the time the mystery photo was taken, the hospital was being used as a prison for Union soldiers. Then in 1886, the most damaging earthquake to have ever occurred in the eastern United States struck the Charleston area, destroying the original Roper Hospital.”
Others who recognized the hospital were: Bill Segars of Hartsville; David Lupo of Mount Pleasant; Elizabeth Jones of Columbia; George Graf of Palmyra, Va.; Curtis Joyner of Charleston; and Truett Jones of Summerville.
- Send us a mystery picture. If you have a photo that you believe will stump readers, send it along (but make sure to tell us what it is because it may stump us too!) Send to: feedback@statehousereport.com and mark it as a photo submission. Thanks.
Send us your thoughts
We encourage you to send in your thoughts about policy and politics impacting South Carolina. We print non-defamatory comments, but unless you provide your contact information – name and hometown, plus a phone number used only by us for verification – we can’t publish your thoughts.
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Statehouse Report, founded in 2001 as a weekly legislative forecast that informs readers about what is going to happen in South Carolina politics and policy, is provided by email to you at no charge every Friday.
- Editor and publisher: Andy Brack, 843.670.3996
- Statehouse bureau chief: Jack O’Toole
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