Did Obamacare Opponents Keep Ethics Reform Alive?

It took some legislative wheeling and dealing, but ethics reform will get a floor vote in the state Senate on Tuesday.

Passing bills in any legislative chamber requires building coalitions and making compromises. The members of those coalitions often have competing interests and must believe that compromise will still result in those interests being served. A ticking clock makes compromise more or less likely, depending on the legislator.

That was the situation last week that caused ethics reform—one of the signature issue of this general assembly—to nearly not even come to a floor vote in the Senate.

Not only is ethics reform a key issue for the legislature, it’s a priority for Gov. Nikki Haley as well. She called a press conference two weeks ago calling on the Senate to pass reform. A week or so earlier, after yet another controversy involving the state plane, Democrats criticized the governor while also stressing the importance of new ethics legislation. And a few weeks before the plane fiasco, House Democrats called for meaningful reform in their chamber.

But ethics is just one of several priorities for the Senate. And definitely behind the budget in importance. Some other Senators, mostly from the Upstate but also including Beaufort County’s Tom Davis, view the nullification of Obamacare as deserving of precedence.

So last Wednesday, when it came time for a special order to move the ethics bill to a floor vote, the nullification advocates and Hugh Leatherman (R-Florence), the Finance Chair and the person in charge of the budget, voted to block it. The vote was seven short of the needed two-thirds majority.

At that point, the Judiciary Committee Chairman, Larry Martin (R-Pickens) pulled aside several of the Senators who wanted to vote to nullify Obamacare—Lee Bright (R-Spartanburg), Tom Corbin (R-Greenville) and Kevin Bryant (R-Anderson), were among them.

Martin told the group that he needed their support to get ethics to a vote and in exchange he would help set a special order for nullification. In Martin’s view ethics reform has a better likelihood of passing, though it’s far from a sure thing.

“I told those guys I couldn’t support nullification,” Martin told Patch. “I feel like we dealt with it in the budget by blocking Medicaid. If nullification did pass, it’s a lawsuit waiting to happen and that would just cost the state more money.”

Sen. Katrina Shealy (R-Lexington) said she was sympathetic to those senators who support nullification, even though, like Martin, she believes it would lead to costly lawsuits. “I get the same amount of calls from constituents on nullification as I do on ethics,” Shealy told Patch. “But, as much as I like him, we saw with Robert Ford how important it is that we act on ethics reform.”

In the end, both ethics reform and nullification passed special order the second time around. It will come to the Senate floor on Tuesday. Among the votes that changed were Leatherman’s. Neither Martin nor Shealy could say what changed Leatherman’s mind. It’s been suggested that Leatherman is not necessarily a fan of the ethics legislation, which would contradict his vote the second time around. Sources told Patch that Leatherman could just as easily voted as he did in the interest of making sure the budget process is completed in a timely fashion.

Democrats in the Senate will be faced with a tough vote on Tuesday that is almost entirely political. The party’s likely nominee for governor, Vincent Sheheen, has made his feeling about ethics reform clear, and it could be a major feature of his campaign against Haley in 2014.

But, Democrats must decide if they want to allow Haley to say she helped pass meaningful ethics reform on the campaign trail or if they want her to say ethics reform would have passed if Democrats had not blocked it in the Senate. Sources told Patch that Democrats are leaning towards the former.

And make no mistake, Haley and her staff is watching the process closely. Martin said he has been in regular communication with Haley’s team. “I get messages and texts from them regularly checking on the ethics bill,” Martin said.

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