It is the spring of judicial reform in the South Carolina Statehouse. This legislative analysis compares and contrasts these two major bills, in light of Palmetto Promise’s previous positions on judicial reform, most notably our January 2021 Judging the Judges report.

This week, the South Carolina House of Representatives took a substantial step toward judicial reform in the Palmetto State.

American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Senior Fellow Emeritus Mark J. Perry estimates that over the last fifteen years he has posted some 3,000 infographics to cyberspace—charts, graphs, tables, figures, maps, and Venn diagrams—each serving as his famous “Chart of the Day.” For some of us, Perry’s charts are  “eye candy” because of their combination of simplistic

It’s been more than 18 months since the Court first heard the case and the state’s civil asset forfeiture system continues uninhibited.

Big Tech is a big problem. Whether one is a Republican or Democrat, rich or poor, there is near universal agreement that this massive online oligarchy is out of control. But the proposed solution getting the most attention is in many ways worse than the problem – and it doesn’t even address what concerns us most. Sound familiar?

It is no surprise then that our friends at the Foundation for Governmental Accountability rated the new South Carolina election law Number 1 in America.

A few weeks before the 2021-22 session began, Palmetto Promise Institute published our Palmetto Playbook making recommendations on issues like education, healthcare, energy, quality of life, and taxation & spending. How did we do?  

Thanks to strong state laws and aggressive legal initiatives taken to defend them (one of which was fought—and won—before the US Supreme Court) South Carolina has preempted many problems and largely avoided debacles like those experienced by our neighbors in Georgia and elsewhere.

H.4586 would open up the opportunity for criminal record expungement to more people and bring South Carolina’s criminal record expungement laws in line with the rest of the nation.

South Carolina lost 441 farms between 2012 and 2017, especially in rural counties. Part of that is surely due to broader trends of market consolidation as well as a slough of untimely droughts and hurricanes – but could outdated and entrepreneurship-killing regulations be contributing too?