Rom Reddy: South Carolina Government is Weaponized Against The Citizen

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by ROM REDDY

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If you have never been to family court, probate court or administrative court in South Carolina, consider yourself fortunate. For many citizens, these courts are not places of justice. They are places of fear, confusion and coercion. They are where ordinary people come face to face with a system that no longer serves them – and in many cases actively works against them.

Here’s the important truth you need to know: In South Carolina, government has been weaponized against the citizen.

It shows up in the courts. Lawyer-legislators appoint the judges. They reappoint the judges. They can fire the judges. Then they walk into those same courtrooms and practice in front of the judges they helped put on the bench. If you are represented by one of them and the other side is not, good luck. That is not justice. That is a rigged system hiding behind robes and procedure. And it is a direct violation of the separation of powers our Constitution demands.

But the courts are only part of the problem. The deeper issue is the agency state.

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South Carolina is crawling with unelected agencies that exercise enormous power over citizens’ lives. DSS. DES. SCDOT. DNR. Public Safety. That is just the beginning. There are seventeen public safety agencies alone. Seventeen. Most citizens could not name them, and more importantly, could not tell you who they are accountable to. Because the answer is simple. They are not accountable to you. In many cases, they are accountable to no one.

These agencies write regulations with the force of law. They investigate. They prosecute. They fine. They threaten. They ruin livelihoods. They do it all without a vote, without transparency, and without meaningful oversight. When a citizen pushes back, the full weight of the state comes down on them. Lawyers. Hearings. Years of delay. Financial exhaustion. That is the strategy. Not justice. Attrition.

This is what happens when one branch of government accumulates too much power and then delegates it to permanent bureaucracies. The legislature wants control, but it cannot possibly manage everything it controls. So it hands authority to agencies. Those agencies then expand that authority. More rules. More enforcement. More power. Soon, no one can tell where the law ends and regulation begins.

Meanwhile, the executive branch is largely missing in action. The Governor should be leading, directing, and holding agencies accountable. Instead, power is fractured across boards, commissions, and legislative appointees. When something fails, no one is responsible. When citizens are harmed, no one answers. When systems break, the response is always the same. Pass the buck.

When everyone is responsible, no one is responsible.

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The result is a government that serves itself. A government that protects insiders. A government that grows richer and more powerful while the citizen grows weaker and poorer. Property taxes become a life sentence. Income taxes remain the highest of any red state. Roads crumble. Education fails. Violent crime rises. And agencies continue to bully citizens under the color of law.

This is not what our founders envisioned.

They believed rights come from God, not government. They believed power flows from the people upward, not from bureaucracy downward. They believed government should be constrained because history teaches that unchecked power always leads to tyranny. That is why they designed a system of separation of powers. That is why they insisted on accountability. That is why they warned us.

South Carolina has strayed far from that design.

We have replaced God as our shepherd with government as our shepherd. We have replaced self-governance with rulemaking. We have replaced courage with compliance. We have allowed a system to emerge where citizens are treated as subjects to be managed rather than people to be served.

This did not happen overnight. It happened slowly. Quietly. Regulation by regulation. Board by board. Agency by agency. Until one day, the citizen wakes up in a courtroom or an administrative hearing and realizes the system is not on their side.

That is the moment many of us have experienced. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

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This is why we fight for judicial reform. This is why we demand agency consolidation. This is why we insist on restoring executive accountability. This is why DOGESC and the Palmetto Revolution exist. Not to tear down government, but to return it to its proper place. Not to inflame division, but to restore balance. Not left versus right, but citizen versus a system that has forgotten who it serves.

2026 will mark the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding. Our founders faced a choice. Accept tyranny or resist it. They chose resistance, grounded in faith, courage, and the belief that self-governance was worth fighting for.

Now it is our turn.

This is a call to return power to the citizen. A call to return money to the citizen.

The weaponization of government against the citizen must end.

It will only end when the citizens of South Carolina stand up together and demand it.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…

Rom Reddy is a businessman from Isle of Palms, S.C., and the founder of the DOGE SC movement.

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