The General Assembly and Veto Do-Overs

In a famous Seinfeld episode the character George goes through extremes to get a "do-over" with a retort he wish he’d made to a former coworker, going so far as to get a new job in a new town with the same coworker to get his chance.

We’ve all wanted a do-over on something we’ve done or not done. The good news is that if you’re a fan of do-overs, you don’t have to go through the same extremes George did – you can just get elected to the state General Assembly.

You would think of all the places in life that a do-over wouldn’t be allowed is when it comes to our democratic process. After all, if you don’t like who you voted for, you don’t get to go back a day or even an hour later and change your mind.

Unfortunately, that very thing is commonplace in the General Assembly – at least when it comes to overriding gubernatorial vetoes.

Last year, for example, the governor issued 47 line-item budget vetoes. In the end, the House sustained 17 of those vetoes, and the Senate sustained another four. But the first time around, the House sustained 24 and the Senate sustained 12, only to go back and reconsider seven and eight vetoes, respectively.

In most of these cases, the legislature overruled a common sense veto whose purpose was either to protect taxpayers, or to increase transparency and accountability.

Among the vetoes initially sustained – but later reconsidered and overruled by the House – include a plan to permit the sale of unneeded aircraft assets, as well as a veto that would have prevented the transfer of the state’s Aeronautics Division to the state Budget and Control Board.

Similarly, the Senate sustained and then later overruled proposals prohibiting state park privatization and prohibiting the sale of unused Department of Natural Resources offices.

The problem with such do-overs is that while they are technically permitted by House and Senate rules, they violate a sense of fair play, permitting the legislative leadership to manipulate and change votes they don’t like.

House and Senate rules stipulate that only legislators on the prevailing side can ask to reconsider a vote. If a member on the prevailing side makes a motion to reconsider, then a majority of legislators can agree to do so.

Thus when legislators see votes going in a direction they don’t like, they vote that way so they’ll be on the "prevailing side" of the vote with the intention of making a motion to reconsider.

In other words, if a legislator wants to override a certain veto, but sees the votes are trending toward a sustainment, he can vote to sustain the veto instead – the opposite of what he truly believes – in hopes of swinging enough votes to change the outcome later on.

Sometimes the shenanigans are embarrassingly obvious. For example, during the 2009 session the General Assembly passed legislation (H 3919) creating a new S.C. Housing Commission.

The governor vetoed the bill on the grounds that the state already has a housing "authority" and does not need a "commission" on top of that. The House initially agreed and sustained the veto by a vote of 69 to 40.

Curiously, one of the bill’s sponsors, Rep. Lanny Littlejohn of Spartanburg, voted to sustain the veto on his very own bill. Not surprisingly, Littlejohn subsequently made a motion to reconsider, leading the House to override the veto by a vote of 81 to 24.

Sometimes, though, it’s less a matter of votes flip-flopping, than it is legislators not bothering to vote in the first place.

In 2007, the governor vetoed a bill adding two additional trustees to the Winthrop University Board of Trustees, arguing that the bill’s only purpose was to increase the university’s clout in lobbying the legislature for more state funds.

Initially, the House agreed, sustaining the veto 29 to 47. Then, a few hours later, the House reconsidered and overrode the veto 19 to 79. In other words, 22 additional legislators participated in the second go-around.

The real message here is that legislators don’t seem to care much for the democratic process that got them elected to begin with. If they did, they would enact rules that prohibited do-overs and provided for on-the-record voting and more transparency.

If members of the General Assembly are going to cast votes to game the system, the general public can at least exercise the same option come election time. In many cases, South Carolinians deserve a do-over.