The House’s version of the bill has been sent to the House Education and Public Works Committee, where Chairwoman Shannon Erickson told The State that she doesn’t have a timeline on when her committee will start work on the legislation.
“Have you seen the bill? It’s ginormous,” said Erickson, R-Beaufort. “It covers everything from soup to nuts. I will
very carefully be collaborative, and I will very carefully have days for testimony before that moves. That’s something too big not to have some good talks about it and hear from the public.”
Were the bill to move forward, there is little that Democrats could do to stop the bills given that Republicans have a super majority in both houses.
Previous efforts to ban DEI initiatives from the floor have grounded the House budget debate to a halt. In order to prevent this, state Rep. Nathan Ballentine said he has proposed a budget proviso that would target DEI in a narrower manner than the bills.
Ballentine, R-Richland, said the bill uses a sledgehammer whereas he compared the proviso to using a scalpel.
“I think it will do things that will be unintended consequences that frankly we can’t do,” Ballentine said. “It sounds good to the public. People could run around and say they completely eliminated DEI but that will cause more problems than what it was supposed to do.”
Rep. Justin Bamberg, D-Bamberg, said that he believed many Republicans felt pressure to pass an anti-DEI bill because of the rhetoric of President Trump and his supporters, who had shifted state Republican parties further to the right.
“I wish more of them had the courage to stand up and say, ‘certain things aren’t right and and were not going to do that and if you’re going to say I’m not a Republican because of that then so be it,” Bamberg said. “It’s very weird that the pendulum has swung such that the Republican super majority is now the big government party.”
