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South Carolina first district congresswoman Nancy Mace seems intent on making long-overdue judicial reform a centerpiece of her prospective candidacy for governor of the Palmetto State in 2026.
And while Mace has yet to officially announce her gubernatorial bid – let alone start staking out specific policy points – she’s made it abundantly clear she’s gunning for the status quo.
“You want justice in South Carolina?” Mace wrote on X. “Start by cutting the General Assembly’s puppet strings on judges.”
Mace has previously called out the Palmetto State’s incestuous judicial corruption, but this is the first time she’s started substantively leaning into the ongoing debate over judicial selection reform.
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As FITSNews has frequently noted, South Carolina is one of only two states in America in which powerful lawyer-legislators control the selection of judges via legislative election. Actually, it’s worse than that – a legislatively controlled panel screens judicial nominees ahead of time, effectively rigging these races before they begin.
South Carolina’s current judicial selection process requires those applying for judgeships to submit their resumes to the 10-member Judicial Merit Selection Commission (JMSC), a legislatively controlled panel. The S.C. Senate appoints five commission members to this body; the S.C. House of Representatives picks the other five.
The panel then “screens” these candidates – a notoriously corruptible process which allows powerful lawyer-legislators to manipulate the field of candidates to ensure the eventual election of their preferred selections.
Minor changes to this process were approved last year, but reformers at the S.C. State House – led by representative Joe White of Newberry, S.C. – are pushing for more substantive changes. Even status quo governor Henry McMaster chided lawmakers last year for failing to accomplish meaningful reform.
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RELATED | LEGISLATIVE TYRANNY ROLLS ON
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“I have made clear that my preference for the federal model of executive appointment with legislative confirmation,” the governor said last spring. “I recognize, however, that two-thirds of the General Assembly’s members – the threshold necessary for a constitutional amendment – appear unwilling to relinquish its exclusive authority to elect judges.”
They remain unwilling to relinquish this exclusive authority, sadly.
No meaningful judicial selection reform was proposed during the legislative session which ended earlier this month – although a bill was belatedly introduced which would limit the ability of retired judges to continue serving without being re-screened. Mace’s top prospective gubernatorial rival – four-term attorney general Alan Wilson – has embraced restrictions on the continued service of retired judges.
FITSNews has consistently championed judicial reform which incorporates gubernatorial nomination, legislative advice and consent and public accountability – a hybrid model, in other words. In fact, we’ve been calling for the General Assembly’s puppet strings on judges to be cut for years.
“”The most immediate and critical need is to make sure this power is permanently removed from the hands of politicians at the S.C. State House as soon as possible,” I wrote back in September 2021. “Lawmakers have abused this authority for their own selfish ends for far too long. Enough is enough.”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…
Will Folks is the founding editor of the news outlet you are currently reading. Prior to founding FITSNews, he served as press secretary to the governor of South Carolina. He lives in the Midlands region of the state with his wife and eight children.
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5 comments
Is she still an investor in your company? Is she paying you to advise her politically?
Nancy Mace is not pushing anything, and neither are you. Your schtick is this “judicial reform” – but you do not have any real reporting on why it is a problem. All you do is make things up and repeat them. I would tell you to write a series laying out specific examples of why we need to pick new judges and pick them a different way, but you and I both know you do not have any actual examples.
Mace has not a single original thought in her head, so this sounds like a good bandwagon to jump on. But it says a lot more about her than the South Carolina judicial system.
The real problem coming is how you are going to suck up to both Wilson and Mace while they destroy each other. And meanwhile we all sit here waiting for our new Governor, same as the old Governor.
I’ll give you examples. Real ones.
Date- certain trials with long-standing scheduling orders get trial dates booted downfield because one of the lawyers in the case is a lawyer-legislator who gives no real reason to the court to justify the request, but it is granted nonetheless. Meanwhile, in the exact same scheduling conference, a female lawyer in a different case stands up and asks for a continuance because her husband is returning from a 9 month deployment to Iraq, and the judge denies her request. The gasp in the courtroom from the other lawyers is audible. I was there – saw the whole thing.
Tort cases in notoriously pro-plaintiff districts that were subject to mandatory mediation orders somehow move 80 places forward on the trial roster overnight, and when defense counsel points out that the mediation has not occurred yet, the judge still slates it for trial because the lawyer legislator “needs it done” because the session is starting in 3 weeks and he still has to take his family vacation before it starts. Or, conversely a case is coming up for trial, has been mediated twice, but the lawyer-legislator or JMC lawyer asks for another mediation because he’s obviously not ready to try the case. Judge grants the requests and orders a 3rd mediation.
Of course, you’re going to demand I name the judge and the parties, then call me a coward when I don’t. I’m not stupid. and I don’t care. I know what the food chain looks like in our court system and where we non-lawyer legislators and judicial merit committee members stand in it – several notches above the rest of us. I might be a wolf on the food chain, but I know not to poke the bear.
I am not going to ask you to name names and call you a coward. I know this will come as a surprise, but all of you on here attacking me personally and calling me names does not really get to me. I understand your point about remaining anonymous (for this specific issue). It is my choice not to, and your choice to. That is fine.
I can understand your examples are frustrating. They are not the ones this blog is always whining about, because they involve scheduling. Will lies repeatedly to get the citizens to think judges are letting criminal run wild, which is just made up.
Unfortunately, I have had all those things in your comment happen with both lawyer-legislators and non-legislators. That is more of a docket management problem than some deep flaw in our current sitting judges. It is not just JMC or other lawyer-legislators that get that treatment, it is all different kinds of lawyers.
The current Chief of the Supreme Court seems focused on docket management and is trying to create tools to avoid these problems. Maybe it will work, maybe it will not. But Will (and Alan Wilson and I guess now Nancy Mace) are not talking about docket issues. They don’t like certain rulings, but they seem to struggle to understand them. That is my major complaint. Docket management is a far broader problem than the lawyer-legislator issue. Selling it to people the wrong way is misleading and Will is all in on that fraud.
Batshit crazy.