Three of South Carolina’s top political leaders announced Tuesday their plans to file a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice’s decision to block the state’s controversial voter ID law.

Attorney General Alan Wilson said he will file a lawsuit within the next two weeks against the Justice Department in Washington D.C. district court.

South Carolinians have soured on Nikki Haley, turning the relatively new governor from a national Tea Party favorite into a chief executive struggling to maintain support among members of her own party, the latest Winthrop University poll shows.

Gov. Nikki Haley’s staff is refusing to testify today before a Senate panel investigating a controversial decision to expand a Georgia port.

The panel could vote at today’s meeting to subpoena the staffers and force them to testify.

S.C. Supreme Court justices Tuesday aggressively questioned lawyers on both sides of a momentous case that could reshape sales tax collections in the Palmetto State.

Attorney Cam Lewis, set to argue the numerous exemptions to the state’s sales tax starve public education and are so haphazard as to be unconstitutional, was interrupted by a justice before he could utter three sentences.

Associate Justice Donald Beatty asked Lewis why his plaintiff, a Columbia lawyer with two school-age children, had the legal standing to even bring a suit.

HERE WE go again. Another legal challenge we must fight in order to defend an unneeded law that the Legislature passed because our state lawmakers would rather play dress-up as federal lawmakers than address the actual problems that plague our state.

Do the U.S. Justice Department and the ACLU have a legitimate legal objection to the state’s latest anti-immigration law? To the voter ID law? Who knows? Some of their legal complaints do seem specious.

WITH MUCH debate about new school attendance lines in Richland District 2 centering on where students on free and reduced-price lunch will be taught, it’s important that everyone understands one thing about youngsters who grow up in poor homes.

While they might have to rely on free and reduced lunches to eat, they can learn. Many excel.

I know. I grew up on the poor side of Rosewood Drive. I’m the youngest of 11 children. My mom raised us alone. And, yes, I was on the free-lunch plan. And, as I’ve said in this column before, I enjoyed every one of those free lunches. More importantly, I needed every one. But the fact that my mom couldn’t afford to pay for my lunch didn’t mean she failed to teach her children the importance of education.

BACK IN 2004, Marci Andino was accused of shilling for corporate America and the Republican Party as she rolled out the state’s new electronic voting machines. Those complaints continue to this day, as critics insist that machines that don’t spit out paper receipts to voters are subject to manipulation and stolen elections.

Then over the past couple of years, the director of the State Election Commission got some harsh looks from GOP lawmakers when she joined county election officials in calling for an open early voting system. Democrats love and Republicans hate early voting, which election professionals argue would help keep lines moving on Election Day, at minimum cost, by replacing the restricted absentee voting procedure that more and more people are using illegally to vote in advance.

Listed below are the state’s sales tax exemptions, along with the official estimate of their values from the Board of Economic Advisors. Most estimates are from 2008, although the gasoline tax estimate was updated in 2009. Some numbers likely are much higher today. Exemptions that have been ruled unconstitutional or discontinued (such as the gun-tax holiday) and about a dozen exemptions whose value the BEA puts at zero have been omitted.

1951

Publications and on-line access used in schools: $21.5 million.

Livestock used as beasts of burden or to provide food, pelts or fur: $58.9 million.

U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, a Columbia Democrat, Wednesday decried the widening income gap that has seen the wealth of the richest Americans increase at almost seven times the rate of the middle class over the last generation.

Clyburn, the assistant Democratic leader of the U.S. House, focused on the income gap at a meeting of the bipartisan congressional super-committee charged with finding at least $1.2 trillion in deficit savings by Thanksgiving.

U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, interrupted an interview with a reporter here Saturday to speak with two elementary-school age children that she quickly labeled “little Democrats.”

“We are leaving no stone unturned,” she said once she returned to the interview.

More than 74,000 people who skipped voting in past elections may have been excluded from data used to estimate how many voters lack state-issued identification that’s at the heart of South Carolina’s new law requiring photo IDs to vote, the State Election Commission said Friday.

Phil and Wesley take a break from the Senate to take sweet tea vodka shots with Richland County Democratic Party Chairman Boyd Summers and Columbia Tea Party President Allen Olsen. Voter ID, roll call voting and the Tea Party movement are the big topics of discussion.

Dealing with county, economy priorities
By ADAM BEAM
 abeam@thestate.com

Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin’s first six months in office were marked by efforts to repair the city’s relationship with Richland County and to create a “sense of urgency” at City Hall to achieve breakthroughs on lingering issues.

In 2011, Benjamin said he plans to work with surrounding local governments to put an “intense focus on economic development issues” — including plans to build an industrial park to attract the type of major businesses that have passed on Columbia in recent months.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Phil Bailey
phil@scsenatedems.org

December 16, 2010

Sheheen Unveils Agenda For Change

Camden, SC – South Carolina state Senator Vincent Sheheen today released the legislation he pre-filed for the 2011 Legislative Session.
Sheheen issued the following statement:

“Today, I am pre-filing a legislative agenda that if enacted would fundamentally and dramatically reform the way South Carolina’s Government operates. If adopted, this Agenda for Change would bring responsibility to spending, restructure the governor’s responsibilities and powers, modernize the legislature’s operations, and crack down on waste, fraud and abuse within our government.”

“As a member of the minority party, my obligation and goal is to put forward and challenge the powers that be with ideas that would fundamentally reform what has become a broken government. My hope is that this year, the leaders of our state will embrace the true change that is so desperately needed in our long suffering state.”

Sheheen’s Agenda For Change:

Rep. Jim Clyburn believes his newly created post in the U.S. House leadership will help preserve South Carolina’s political clout, which he fears the state is losing as a result of the recent election.

Clyburn will have the title of assistant minority leader in the House next year. It’s a title that has existed before, Clyburn noted in a news conference Friday in his Columbia office. Previously, it existed only in the U.S. Senate.

Just steps from the State House, a group of S.C. House members, mainly Republicans, crunched popcorn in the darkened Nickelodeon Theatre , watching the new education documentary “Waiting for Superman.”

South Carolinians for Responsible Government, a group fighting for seven years to convince lawmakers to offset the cost of private school tuition, rented out the theater and invited the crowd to the private movie showing. SCRG’s hope: The emotional film, which throws stones at failing, public schools, paired with shifting political winds might spell success for their movement.

Maybe, they say, enough has changed in South Carolina that school choice legislation might pass in 2011.

South Carolina lost lots of national political clout when longtime U.S. Rep. John Spratt was defeated earlier this month, said U.S. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn.

“We’ll go from being one of the strongest delegations with me and Spratt to being farther down the totem pole,” said Clyburn, who will lose his position as majority whip in January when Republicans take control of the U.S. House. .

Clyburn, now the only Democrat in South Carolina’s six-member delegation, said he’s hoping his new leadership position will allow him to help more South Carolinians and, ultimately, bring the Democrats back to power in the U.S. House.

Gov.-elect Nikki Haley campaigned on increasing South Carolina’s jobs. In South Carolina, health care means jobs — 200,000 jobs. Jobs ranging from home health aides to nursing assistants to brain surgeons to insurance claims processors and hospital administrators. Jobs for people with only a high school diploma (or less) all the way up to years of post-graduate education. Health-care employment was one job sector that held steady during the worst recession since the Great Depression. Does anyone know an unemployed nurse? Or doctor?

(CNN) -- Democrats and Republicans agree on extending tax cuts to the middle class. People who are already struggling to get by do not want to see their taxes go up on January 1.

The question is how to define middle class and whether to give tax breaks to the rich that would add nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars to the deficit. How the two parties handle this question in the next few days or weeks will signal who they really are, whether they will be able to govern together with a divided Congress, and what lessons they took away from the election this month.

Now that the City Council has rejected the idea of having the Richland County sheriff administer the Columbia Police Department, it’s time to press forward with what we should have been talking about all along: the complete unification of the cities of Columbia, Irmo, Forest Acres and other redundant municipalities with the government of Richland County into a single consolidated, simplified and efficient local government system.

Functionally, the whole Midlands has become a more and more cohesive social and economic unit. Thousands of residents live in one municipality, work in another, send their children to school in a third and do their shopping in still another.

After losing disastrously earlier this month, forfeiting every statewide office and one of only two congressional seats they held, S.C. Democrats are in a death spiral.

People inside and out of Democratic circles are questioning whether Democrats have a future in the Palmetto State. Is there any chance of them winning big races in the future like the governor’s office? Is it possible for them to reverse a more than decade-long trend of dwindling power in the State House where Republican majorities rule both the House and Senate?

Short answer: the odds are not good.

Tuesday’s election turned South Carolina bright red, with Republicans sweeping the state’s nine constitutional offices and increasing their majority in the state House of Representatives to a staggering 75 of 124 seats.

But in Richland County, where Democrats won 15 of the 19 local partisan seats on county voters’ ballots, the signature win belonged to Mia Butler in State House District 79. The lobbyist and public relations professional threw together a campaign in eight weeks to defeat Republican Sheri Few, who had been campaigning for a year and had raised more than $90,000.

Two months ago, Butler was tracking the election as a lobbyist when Rep. Anton Gunn surprised people by resigning his seat to take a presidential appointment with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. Butler jumped into the race, and eight weeks later was a public official.

Rep. Anton Gunn, D-Kershaw, will not seek re-election to his S.C. House seat that also takes in Northeast Richland.

Gunn will instead accept a job in the Obama administration, as regional director for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Gunn, elected in 2008, will oversee the federal agency's operations in eight Southeastern states including South Carolina. He is a former USC football player and a key adviser to then candidate Obama's 2008 presidential campaign.