Tag: States Rights

General Assembly Failing Citizens Again

SC House Confederate Flag Debate Today

The SC House of Representatives will begin today what should be the final debate on removal of the Confederate flag from statehouse grounds.

After a bill to remove the flag raced through the SC Senate in the last two days, garnering only three No votes, momentum is on the side of removing the flag.

But, the House may not be as easy even though the bill received first reading approval yesterday.

A total of 26 amendments to the bill are already filed with the possibility of more coming.

Some of the amendments deal with flags to replace the current one when it comes down.

Some are in the realm of the absurd – just like South Carolina politics most of the time.

One, I am told, calls for the American flag to be flown upside down when the Confederate flag is removed. This may not be as ridiculous as it first sounds.

Flying the American flag upside down is an international signal of distress. That seems very appropriate in an area near the statehouse.

Continue Reading →
General Assembly Failing Citizens Again

Great Confederate Flag Debate – Update

The SC General Assembly is expected to at least begin its great confederate flag debate tomorrow.

I have stayed out of the great confederate flag debate discussion until now.

I frankly don’t care whether the flag flying on the statehouse grounds stays up, comes down or blows away.

My heritage is a little different from the sides engaged in this controversy. My great-grandfather being from Pennsylvania fought with the Union army from 1861-3 and 1864-5. For those of you stuck in revisionist history, the Union was the winning side – you know Grant, Sherman and all that.

It’s this revisionist history that has caused South Carolina to keep its head in the sand for so many decades.

The “War of Northern Aggression” was started right here in the Low Country when the newly formed Confederate States Army, under the command of Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, bombarded the Union position at Ft. Sumter in Charleston harbor.

Continue Reading →
Bureaucracy to prevail at expense of the taxpayer

S.C. General Assembly Up to Old Tricks

With pressing needs on infrastructure, education and ethics, the S.C. General Assembly is instead focusing on how to negatively affect local governments.

H3374, which was passed favorably out of a House Ways and Means subcommittee last week, would further shift the costs of providing state services onto the backs of local government. It is expected to be considered in the full House Ways and Means Committee as early as this week.

The bill effectively makes additional cuts to the local government fund, the fund which transfers money from the state to local governments to cover the cost state services at the county levels.

Continue Reading →

Judicial Doctrine of Irreparable Harm

By Paul Gable Buried in a decision yesterday in which the U.S. Supreme Court allowed a restrictive Texas abortion law to be enforced, while the constitutionality of the law is decided, is the concept of irreparable harm to states. Specifically, the concept is stated from a 2013 Supreme Court decision […]

Continue Reading →
Mark Sanford’s Lonely Battle for Austerity: Did It Lead Him to the Appalachian Trail?

Mark Sanford’s Lonely Battle for Austerity

My new book about President Obama and his stimulus, The New New Deal, unspools the politically shrewd but remarkably cynical GOP strategy to obstruct the President.

Congressional Republicans who supported stimulus in 2008 and even voted for a $715 billion stimulus in 2009 somehow pegged Obama’s similar $787 stimulus as the death of capitalism, although they still pursued stimulus cash for their districts.

GOP governors who denounced the stimulus as fiscal lunacy quietly used its aid to states to balance their hemorrhaging budgets. But there is at least one principled Republican politician in the book: Mark Sanford…

Continue Reading →