The Republican Party and all political parties in South Carolina are under attack by the “GOP” controlled state Senate and House. S.2, the bill passed by the GOP controlled Senate last month, takes political parties out of the political party candidate filings process and turns it over to government bureaucrats. H. 3298, the bill recently passed by the GOP controlled House, does the same. The House bill is even worse than the Senate version because it places further restrictions on political parties. The bills are designed to minimize conservative influence in the selection of Republican candidates.
These bills are falsely advertised as “election reform” to allegedly correct the fiasco created by the legislature and State Supreme Court last year. That disaster designed to protect incumbents from grass roots uprising removed hundreds of candidates from ballots and disenfranchised thousands of voters.
It is important to realize that a primary is not an election, it is one means by which political parties select the candidates to represent them in elections. These bills effectively take the political parties out of the business of selecting their own candidates and turn the registration and selection of party candidates over to the state election commission.
Democrats totally controlled South Carolina’s “Jim Crow” government for 100 years since 1876. Voters began to “throw off” the Democrat yoke during the Goldwater-Regan era. Entrenched Democrat career lawmakers had to make a choice. They could face certain defeat or claim to be transformed into conservatives and switch to the Republican Party.
Republican politicians were anxious to gain power for the first time in their lives. Consequently, they were willing to share with Democrats in order to retain that power as leaders of the Senate and House, because the legislature runs South Carolina, including appointing all judges as well as members of powerful boards and commissions. The Governor is virtually a powerless figurehead.
By encouraging party switches, Democrats such as the late Sen. J. Verne Smith of Greer took advantage of the power his seniority gave him as a member of the majority party. He put an “R” after his name, assuring reelection in a heavily Republican District but he never changed. He continued to bring billions of taxpayer dollars to the Upstate, but supported and voted consistently with his Democrat friends in the Senate.
Currently, a large majority of the Senate, the leadership of the House, and a voting majority of both bodies are made up of Democrats and Republicans in Name Only (RINOs). The RINOs run as conservative Republicans, however, they almost never support any bills supported by Republican voters or contained in the Republican Platform.
Grass roots organizations have begun exposing the voting records of phony conservatives and they have panicked. They have dredged up dinosaur RINOs from years past to create a “straw man” to deflect attention from their mischief in Columbia. They are using Obama type scare tactics in daily newspaper op-ed pieces to distort the truth and deflect attention from the real problems. They are encouraging RINO supporters that include Democrats, to attend GOP precinct reorganization meetings and get elected delegates to county conventions, threatening: “Without your involvement now, you could lose your right to vote forever.” It would not be surprising if dozens of ACORN Democrats show up and take over some GOP precinct meetings.
A point in fact is that most RINOs could not win a primary if only Republicans voted. They depend on Democrat crossover votes to defeat the legitimate conservative candidates. Through legislation, they have ensured that their Democrat supporters will continue to vote in Republican primaries. They are now panicked about the possibility of Republicans selecting their candidates by convention, as Democrats, Constitution Party, Libertarian Party and others frequently do, and are acting in desperation.
