it’s not clear that S.C. Senate Republican Leader Shane Massey was taking direct aim at U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace when he started last week’s Senate Oversight Committee meeting by saying the Legislature’s oversight process was deliberately designed not to mimic the one in Washington.
The Legislature’s purpose, he explained, is to find problems before they occur, unlike what happens in the Congress.
It’s understandable if he was. As one of the key authors of the hard-fought legislation that abolished the Budget and Control Board, turned more executive authority over to the executive branch of government and assigned the Legislature the clear new duty of providing oversight of those executive agencies, he was no doubt frustrated by Ms. Mace’s effort to mischaracterize a routine oversight review of the attorney general’s office as an investigation of alleged wrongdoing by her chief political rival, Attorney General Alan Wilson.
That’s not to say there weren’t any problems raised about Mr. Wilson — problems that would make great campaign fodder if the Republican race for governor were at all focused on substance instead of … well, instead of what it has been focused on to date.
Fortunately, for Mr. Wilson but more importantly for the rest of us, the committee staff’s review of his office mostly picked up the typical responses you’d get from employees of any government, nonprofit or private-sector entity when they’re asked to complain anonymously about the boss: complaints about favoritism, unfair pay, out-of-touch management, the office dress code.
No allegations that anybody is doing anything illegal or unethical or that anything needs to be investigated by outside eyes. That is: None of the sorts of problems that similar reviews have uncovered at the Department of Juvenile Justice or the Department of Corrections, through a process designed to uncover simmering fires before they explode.
There was, however, one notable complaint that long has deserved more public attention: focus.
The three-page outline describes long-time staff as questioning whether the office’s expansion into new areas has diluted its ability to focus on its traditional obligations. The specific examples mentioned involved new tasks the Legislature has assigned to the office. But as The Post and Courier’s Nick Reynolds reports, Senate Democratic Leader Brad Hutto mentioned another one, which we would echo: Mr. Wilson’s incessant practice of interjecting himself — and by extension his office and our entire state — into federal partisan political battles.
When Joe Biden and Barack Obama were in the presidency, Mr. Wilson was constantly filing his own lawsuits or joining with other GOP attorneys general in filing legal challenges against presidential directives and how federal agencies enforced federal law. With Donald Trump in office, he’s sued states run by Democrats.
We’ve never figured out what this has to do with being South Carolina’s attorney general. Yes, Mr. Wilson told the panel he can save the state money by working with other states to get the courts to rule in ways that will allow South Carolina to enforce its own laws without having to go to court. And sometimes that might happen. But South Carolina still gets sued over laws similar to the ones from other states that have been upheld, and these days he’s filing suits challenging laws South Carolina hasn’t passed and wouldn’t pass.
Surely those purely political lawsuits divert the attention of not just the attorney general but his staff as well. And inevitably taking on that work that is not part of his job description either contributes to the burnout staff complained about or else results in some of the important work of the office going undone. Possibly both.
Our Exhibit A of the work undone, as many of you know, is enforcing South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act, despite Mr. Wilson’s great-on-paper support of the law. The attorney general’s office could significantly improve state and local government compliance in less than a year if it would simply file — or even just threaten to file — a single lawsuit a month challenging a government agency’s violations of the open-meetings portion of the law, or the open-records portion.
There have been plenty of cases where the attorney general bullied state and local agencies into following his interpretation of laws on guns and COVID and more, but precious little on open government — either because it’s not really a priority or else because there’s simply not enough bandwidth in an office that is fixated on federal partisan battles. We’re sure legislators could come up with their own favorite example of a routinely violated state law that Mr. Wilson could get agencies to obey with just a bit of attention.
One of the candidates running to replace Mr. Wilson as attorney general, Solicitor David Pascoe, has pledged to take that aggressive role in enforcing the FOI law. We need that same commitment from the other candidates. And whether or not Mr. Wilson defeats Ms. Mace and the other GOP candidates and becomes our next governor, he could still do our state a lot of good by shifting the focus of his current office from out-of-state partisan fights back to South Carolina’s problems — starting with the blatant disregard most state and local agencies have for the public’s legal right to know what our government is doing.
