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SC HOTLINE: BOBTAILED BILL WOULD WORSEN AN ALREADY ABYSMAL BUSINESS CLIMATE

FITSNews – June 23, 2008 – As if South Carolina’s rising unemployment rate and anemic personal income growth weren’t sufficient anchors to creating prosperity for our citizens, our state’s business climate could suffer yet another blow if the S.C. General Assembly fails to sustain Gov. Mark Sanford’s veto of an unconstitutional “bobtailed” bill.

We uncovered this latest example of “bobtailing” – or attaching unrelated additions to a piece of separate legislation – earlier this month. Since then, the website SC Hotline has done a sensational job exposing the special interest ambitions behind this clearly unconstitutional piece of legislation. Today, Hotline editor Jeffrey Sewell has another solid article detailing the opposition this “oil marketers’ bailout” is encountering among South Carolina business leaders.  From Sewell’s story:

Two of the state’s top business groups, the S.C. Manufacturers Alliance and the S.C. Business and Political Action Committee (SCBIPEC), are outraged over what the legislature did for a reason (which has) nothing to do with bobtailing.

The business groups are concerned that the amendment essentially voids private contracts between oil companies and marketers.

They say that would be a terrible precedent. If this misdeed is allowed to stand, then any special interest with money and clout could slither out of contracts simply by asking the legislature to intervene.

Here’s how Tom Deloach, CEO and president of South Carolina BIPEC sees it: “BIPEC PAC’s analysis for more than 2 decades has been consistently that government’s interference in contractual relations of private parties is at best unwarranted and at worse unconstitutional.”

He’s right. The marketers voluntarily signed contracts giving oil companies the option of selling them ethanol-mixed gasoline. The companies chose to exercise that option because Congress has burdened them with the requirement of increasing the production of the product. The marketers, pitching a hissy fit, dragged their legislative friends into smoke-filled rooms and demanded a fix. THE FIX was in.

This is just the latest in a long line of reasons why South Carolina continues to lag behind the rest of the country in … well, everything. The ease with which anti-business special interests can control our legislative process is staggering, particularly considering that this is supposed to be a “Republican” state, and Republicans are supposed to be “pro-business.”

Of course given Republicans’ recent record in our state, this latest revelation is hardly surprising. Forget market principles and growing the economy, South Carolina’s GOP majority continues to sacrifice those conservative ideals in favor of more regulation and more government.

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