South Carolina Senate Republican Caucus

Voters in Graniteville, Vaucluse and Warrenville will have a historic decision to make Tuesday: Should the three towns merge into one incorporated municipality?

More than 7,000 registered voters live within the 23.7 square miles proposed for incorporation.

Charles Hilton, the chairman of the Graniteville-Vaucluse-Warrenville Inc. Study Committee, said he expects strong voter turnout.

Efforts to incorporate have been ongoing for more than two years, since the Graniteville train wreck devastated the area’s economy. Read the rest of this entry »

A look at South Carolina’s broken probation and parole system

Georgetown County Sheriff Land Cribb works at the scene of Julianne Blakeley’s killing in Litchfield Beach on Sept. 26, 2007. Police later arrested Shane Earl Lawshe, a convicted felon released on parole two months earlier, for the crime.

Julianne Blakeley did what many do when they need their homes painted. She hired a contractor. And, as with most homeowners, she knew almost nothing about the painters she invited in.

On the morning of Sept. 26, firefighters rushed to Blakeley’s Litchfield Beach home after neighbors saw smoke coming from the house. They found the 63-year-old woman dead, partially clothed in her bed. She had been stabbed in the neck and raped. Fires were set in several places. Read the rest of this entry »

I have made transparency in government a focus of my efforts in the South Carolina Senate, because the voters told me that’s important. The first bill I introduced in the Senate was to require my fellow legislators to put their names on requests for funding for local projects, also known as earmarks. It’s another way to keep them from hiding how they spend taxpayers’ money.

Now it’s time to take the next step to make your elected officials even more accountable.

Under current General Assembly rules, many important bills are decided on a voice vote. A voice vote gives legislators a chance to hide under the cover of anonymity. Often, it’s easier to find a lost sock than to find out how a legislator voted. Read the rest of this entry »

Governor urges lawmakers to reconvene to trim state budget

The six highway patrolmen didn’t move a muscle while the governor tried to move a Legislature.

Gov. Mark Sanford, flanked by the troopers, appealed to people on Thursday to call their legislators to go back into session and stop across-the-board budget cuts. The cuts would impair “core government functions” like public safety, he said. Sanford wants the Legislature to make cuts agency-by-agency instead.

He compared it to how a family cuts its budget — they skip going to the movies, they don’t skip paying the mortgage. Read the rest of this entry »