Tag: South Carolina

The Story: The campaign for the Democratic nomination for President has changed considerably in recent days, due first to the South Carolina primary on February...

The Story: Seven candidates for the nomination of the Democratic Party for President of the United States met in Charleston, South Carolina, on Tuesday February...

Former South Carolina Republican Rep. Mark Sanford, who lost his primary race last year after voicing criticism of President Donald Trump, says he is considering mounting a challenge to the President in 2020. #CNN #News

Courson and Rick Quinn are among four lawmakers to resign from office after guilty pleas in the probe. As part of his deal, Richard Quinn, who represented some of South Carolina’s most influential politicians, businesses and state agencies, agreed to testify before a state grand jury. Then he helped draft a letter that Wilson sent to Pascoe suggesting that the attorney general take back control of the probe. The other perjury allegations against Quinn came from cases involving Statehouse lawmakers. Quinn said Harrison worked on campaigns, including having a “major role” in McCain’s presidential runs in 2000 and 2008, along with doing some legal work, according to the indictment. But other grand jury witnesses said Harrison did not perform legal or campaign work. Courson said the money covered personal payments made for campaign expenses over his three decades in office. According to the indictment, Quinn contradicted his daughter in his own testimony, saying allegations that his firm pocketed some of the money from Courson’s Senate account were not accurate “at least from our perspective.” Quinn also said he had did not know about the payments to Courson at first and did not know why Courson was not reimbursing himself directly. While he was in office, Rick Quinn received pay from his own firm Mail Marketing Strategies, Richard Quinn testified. And Rick Quinn discussed happenings at the Statehouse with his father’s clients and helped in RQ&A’s political consulting work, the indictment said.

Mic Smith/Associated Press CHARLESTON, S.C. — Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Tuesday remembered Ernest F. Hollings as “a giant in this state and nation” who evolved to “write the great story of our times.” Speaking at the funeral of Mr. Hollings, the former South Carolina senator who died this month at 97, Mr. Biden hailed his longtime friend and former colleague, a one-time segregationist, as the embodiment of this state’s growth. “People can change,” Mr. Biden said of Mr. Hollings, who was known as Fritz, adding, “We can learn from the past and build a better future.” Mr. Biden’s trip here marked his first visit to an early nominating state this year and came just a week before he is expected to make his long-anticipated entry into the Democratic presidential primary. His somber appearance at The Citadel, South Carolina’s military college and Mr. Hollings’s alma mater, was not the 2020 debut the former vice president and his aides were planning. But his eulogy underscored Mr. Biden’s deep ties to this pivotal state with its high percentage of black voters — and the promise and peril of his candidacy. Mr. Biden once described Mr. Hollings as his best friend in the Senate. Such older Americans here and beyond make up the core of Mr. Biden’s initial base, early polls indicate, and are the sort of reliable participants in primaries that candidates covet. And Mr. Hollings was not the first South Carolina political icon Mr. Biden has honored: In 2003, he delivered a eulogy for Strom Thurmond, a longtime Republican senator and onetime Dixiecrat nominee for president. “Fritz grew and I grew along with him.” Neither he nor Mr. Biden mentioned the fact that the Confederate flag was raised atop South Carolina’s Capitol dome by a state legislator in 1961 when Mr. Hollings was governor. The flag would remain on the Statehouse grounds until 2015, when it was removed in the aftermath of the racist killing of black parishioners at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel church. “He put the Confederate flag on the Statehouse that we had to fight to take down,” said Melissa Watson, a Charleston-area teacher and local Democratic official who is black.

The former vice president has begun testing the approach as he nears an expected campaign launch later this month. That puts both Obama and many of his longtime advisers in an awkward spot. Several months ago, Obama and Biden agreed that it would be best if the former president did not endorse any candidate early in the primary, according to a person with knowledge of the conversation, meaning Biden will be running as an "Obama-Biden Democrat" without Obama's explicit backing. Some Democratic voters share that concern. Biden advisers say it's more than nostalgia that positions the former vice president well in the 2020 campaign. The Obama health law, known as the Affordable Care Act, also has increased in popularity since Obama and Biden left the White House, with many Republican lawmakers now opposed to pushing for a full repeal. Scott Mulhauser, who advised Biden during the 2012 campaign, said Biden's positions put him in "the sweet spot where most of the Democratic Party could be, but also a decent amount of moderates and I'm sure some Republicans." According to a recent Pew Research Center survey of Democratic voters, 53% said they want their party to move in a more moderate direction, while 40% said they preferred a more liberal approach. Harstad, the former Obama pollster, said there's no doubt that Obama's legacy and policy record remain solid with Democratic voters. ___ Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa.

Our Political Fights Are Intense Because We No Longer Agree on the Rules Matthew Walther, writing about Julian Assange in The Week, lists how many Democrats and Republicans changed their minds about Assange depending upon whose secrets he was exposing and concludes: [if Assange exposes Trump’s secrets], we can expect to see both sides revert once more to their circa 2010 defaults. One of the reasons our politics is so contentious and angry is that we can’t agree on what the rules are. But a vocal chunk of Americans don’t really care about what the policies are; they would much rather argue that their side is right. For many people, it depends upon the partisan status of the person accused. For many Americans, when the side they like uses heated rhetoric, it’s speaking truth to power. Is the desire to make more money inherently greedy? For years, the mantra of Bernie Sanders was that the wealthy were driven by an intensely selfish desire: “How many yachts do billionaires need? Boy, Joe Biden’s efforts in the fight about forced busing and desegregation sure are getting a lot of attention these days, aren’t they? At the time, the motivation for spotlighting the teens was clear: to disagree with their often-heated and sometimes factually wrong assertions about gun violence amounted to “attacking children” in the eyes of their pro-gun control allies. Say, who’s the president married to again?

COLUMBIA — When Sam Fogle returned from Iraq after getting hit by a roadside bomb, he suffered from severe brain injuries and severe post-traumatic stress disorder. He said it could do the same for many veterans like him. “I love my state,” Fogle testified Thursday about the Statehouse’s medical marijuana effort. “I don’t want to move out of my state to get the choices others have.” Then there’s Mark Keel, the chief of South Carolina’s Law Enforcement Division. A longtime opponent of legalizing medical marijuana, Keel said he continues to believe that legalizing medical marijuana could lead to a spike in traffic fatalities and other dangerous outcomes, and he said S.C. should maintain its historic independent streak by declining to follow dozens of other states that have legalized medicinal use of the drug. “South Carolina doesn’t have to be like the other 33 states that’s decided to go down that road and conduct social experiments on their citizens,” Keel said. “If you vote yes for this bill... be prepared to open a Pandora’s box of unintended consequences.” The disagreements, reiterated many times in different forms over hours of public testimony Thursday to the Senate’s Medical Affairs Committee, highlighted the ongoing stalemate over whether South Carolina should become the latest state to allow for medical use of cannabis to treat chronic pain, epilepsy and other debilitating conditions. With little to no chance of passing this year, supporters hope the ongoing pressure on the issue can help build momentum heading into the second year of the legislative session in 2020. Many of those who testified have already pleaded with the committee to rule one way or another for years. The committee’s chairman, Sen. Danny Verdin, R-Laurens, suggested that a continued “wait and see” approach to the chance of federal Food and Drug Administration approval may no longer be tenable.

Three of Hollings' children announced his death Saturday morning in a statement. “Our father, Fritz Hollings, was dedicated to his family, the United States Senate and the people of South Carolina," said the statement from Michael Hollings, Helen Hollings Reardon and Ernest Hollings III. He was so honored to have served the people of this great state in the South Carolina House of Representatives, as lieutenant governor and governor, and as a member of the United States Senate. He served as governor from 1959 to 1963. He graduated from the University of South Carolina School of Law in 1947 and was elected to the S.C. House in 1948 at age 26. A decade later, at age 36, Hollings was elected governor of South Carolina, the youngest South Carolina governor in the 20th century. Though he arrived in politics as a segregationist, his mindset changed during the Civil Rights era. “Asking to have one’s name removed from a courthouse is unprecedented,” U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel said in 2015. “Senator Hollings told me, ‘They put my name on the courthouse because I got funding for it. I want to put it in the name of the guy who did justice here.’" While fighting for balanced budgets and economic investment, Hollings also championed legislation to offer assistance to those in need.