March 24th, 2008
Government has all sorts of creative ways to strike a balance between enhancing your life and regulating it to death, and this two-year legislative session is no different.
“There are more inane laws introduced than you could shake a stick at,” House Majority Leader Jim Merrill, R-Daniel Island, said. “Somebody at the grocery store says they’re having trouble with this or that, and they (some legislators) feel they need to introduce a law about it.”
Among the several thousand bills filed this session were proposals to stop parents from smoking in cars if a child younger than 10 is riding along, suspend driver’s licenses for high school students who are absent too often and require restaurants to post notices if they serve food with trans fats.
There’s also a proposal that would prevent people from suing restaurants if they get fat.
Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston, hosted Sens. Robert Ford, D-Charleston, and Larry Martin, R-Pickens, on a recent edition of his weekly news conference sponsored by ETV, a half-hour show where legislators discuss what’s going on around the Statehouse.
On the show, the panel talked about “laws that go too far,” with a focus on South Carolina’s gambling legislation.
McConnell and Ford co-sponsored a bill that would update what some consider to be the state’s outdated anti-gambling laws, which by extension stop people from playing Monopoly at their kitchen table and holding cake raffles at church.
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Author Contact Info: Yvonne Wenger, The Post and Courier
