By John Crangle
South Carolina should amend its Constitution and abolish the 124-member House of Representatives and let the 46-member Senate do all the legislation.
Nebraska abolished its House in 1934 and has saved millions every year in duplicative costs of paying both the House and the Senate to do the same thing twice every year.
The South Carolina House costs $30 million a year in salaries, per diems, travel expenses, and fringe benefits paid out to representatives and to the staffs of the speaker’s office, the employees of 12 committees, the workers at the clerk’s office, security personnel and costs of maintaining the Blatt Building.
The money could be better used to fix South Carolina’s pot-holed streets and roads and to hire more police to fight the crime wave now sweeping the state and to hire more teachers in understaffed schools.
The arguments for keeping the House are few and faulty.
The first is based on the assumption that South Carolina and the United States have both always had houses of representatives. In fact, South Carolina had only an Assembly during the colonial period from 1670 to 1776 and only adopted a two-house legislature after the American Revolution started in 1776.
And, in fact, the new United States only had a single-chamber Congress of the Confederation from 1777 until 1789. It was not until the U.S. Constitution was written in imitation of the British House of Commons and House of Lords and the Roman Republic’s Senate and Assembly that the United States created its House and Senate with legislators from only 13 states.
A common assumption is that the House is needed to somehow balance the Senate.
In fact, the U.S. House was created to give the large population states such as New York and Pennsylvania more members in Congress to balance the fact that all states had two senators.
This, of course, does not apply to the South Carolina Legislature where the 5 million population is equally apportioned in both the House and Senate and the big-population counties such as Richland and Greenville have many more representatives and senators than the small counties such as Allendale and Edgefield.
A related argument for the status quo is that the House is needed to prevent the Senate from making mistakes and abusing its power.
In fact, however, the House has been an eager criminal conspirator in the worst actions of the Senate in history, including the legislation and maintaining of slavery, the decisions to secede and fight the Civil War, the passing of segregation and discrimination laws after 1865 and the passage of the Base Load Review Act in 2007 which created the $9 billion nuclear power plant disaster which has devastated the ratepayers and stockholders since the project was abandoned in 2017 and bankrupted SCANA.
Fortunately, the South Carolina House and Senate do not have control over America’s affairs, the making of war, the ratification of treaties, and the management of the national economy as such authority is vested exclusively in the Congress and executive.
The General Assembly can make only a limited number of bad mistakes, none of which are even close in magnitude to those which can be made by Congress, where it is important to have the House and Senate to balance each other in hopes of preventing catastrophic mistakes.
The next line of argument is that the House has unique functions such as drafting the annual state budget and impeaching state officials.
The writing of the budget could be done alone by the Senate and its staff, and the House has passed on its only recent chance to impeach anyone when Gov. Mark Sanford was briefly called in after his adulterous trip to Argentina and painted with whitewash by the House Judiciary Committee in 2009.
The Senate could have whitewashed Sanford with only 46 pairs of hands — 170 pairs just cost the taxpayers a lot more.
Finally, the House has been a playground of bribery, shakedowns, theft of campaign funds, and personal misconduct going back to Adam and Eve.
Since 1970, a total of 37 state representatives have been convicted of crimes, including just recently since 2014, House Speaker Bobby Harrell, Rep. Jim Merrill, Rep Rick Quinn, Rep. James Harrison, and Rep. Tracy Edge.
Abolishing the House would abolish the opportunities for state representatives to commit more crimes in the future and would save the innocent citizens of South Carolina the embarrassment blunders, mistakes, crimes, and costs of having 124 state representatives to do wrong what 46 state senators could do for much less money and fewer prison cells.
John Crangle is a graduate of the University of South Carolina School of Law and member of the South Carolina Bar. He was a member of a commission appointed in 1991 that proposed ways to improve the selection of judges. Approved changes included a ban on sitting legislators voting for themselves for judicial positions and the creation of a Judicial Merit Selection Commission to screen judicial candidates. He also participated in reforming the magistrate system. Changes effective in 1996 included requiring new magistrates to have a four-year college degree and pass a course in the basic laws magistrates enforce. Crangle ran unsuccessfully for S.C. House District 75 as a Democrat in 2018 with a platform of abolishing the House.
