SC Legislative Session Wrap-up

The SC Legislature wrapped up the first half of the 2025-2026 session last week. Here’s a summary of several noteworthy bills that are in process and will continue to be debated in January 2026. Much credit due to Courtney Thomas and Paul Bowers of the ACLU of SC with the weekly State House Dispatch, who help keep me informed on bills on and off my radar. Highly recommend signing up if you aren’t already.

First, something positive: House Bill 3655 supports evidence-based reforms for juvenile justice. Read more here.

Charleston mayor denies 50501 protest permit

Based on an ordinance passed in 2021, a permit request for a peaceful 50501 protest was denied. Applicants were told they would need a Special Event Permit, which takes 3 months and costs hundreds of dollars. Write to Mayor William Cogswell and Charleston City Council here, where you can also sign a petition that was started when this bad ordinance passed.

Board of Ed fails to amend R43-170: Most disappointingly, the SC Board of Education took the opportunity to ban 10 more books during what was supposed to be a review of Regulation 43-170 following concerns expressed by several board members, including Maya Slaughter for Dorchester County, who for whatever reason voted in favor of the removal. I’ve emailed her to ask why: maya@williamsattys.com

Dr. David O’Shields and Rev. Tony Vincent both provided dissenting votes and are due thanks:

avincent@ed.sc.gov 

doshields@ed.sc.gov 

We must continue to speak out against this bad regulation. At best it should be repealed. You can write to every single member here and call 803-734-8500 to make sure Ellen Weaver hears from us as well. At the very least, it must be revised include alignment with existing state laws on obscenity (rather than overriding and rewriting laws as currently written) and a requirement that challenged materials be considered in full, not just excerpts. Also, allowing parents to challenge district-level decisions without any limit on the number of books challenged wastes the board’s time (to say nothing of the district’s) and allows one person to effectively make decisions on behalf of the entire state.

House Bill 4123: Protection of Minors from Pornography and Obscenities Act: This bill would punish teachers and librarians with 10-year prison sentences for providing books to children that contain “profane language.” Also, we already have multiple specific laws that protect children from obscene materials in Article 3, which defines “Material Harmful to Minors” and “Child Exploitation.” 

In light of the failure of the Board of Ed to revise R43-170, it’s all the more important that we speak out against this outrage of a bill that says it will “eliminate loopholes” in the law that in actuality are carefully considered definitions of obscenity. This is nothing short of government controlling language and we will not have it. 

Status: Pending in House Judiciary Committee. Write to the entire subcommittee here. If Robby Robbins is your house rep, he is on the subcommittee and you can contact him directly at robertrobbins@schouse.gov or (803) 212-6973, or via this link. 

H.4536: Abortion-Inducing Drugs Act: This utterly repugnant bill, introduced on the last day of this session, would potentially criminalize anyone donating to an abortion fund, as well as anyone directly providing or manufacturing abortion-inducing drugs. How this bill is going to hold drug manufacturers liable is absolutely beyond, as is how they will determine at what point in the past a financial donor may be responsible for any particular abortion. Egregiously, it allows the biological “father” to sue for wrongful death without making any requirements for responsibility to the pregnant person. It tries to avoid previous objections by making exceptions for internet speech, for prescription of abortion-inducing drugs for purposes other than an “elective” abortion, and for medical emergency and ectopic pregnancy. It also grossly oversteps by requiring abortion-inducing drug manufacturers/distributors to make sure any prescription or distribution “was done solely for purposes that do not include…elective abortion” and by attempting to override laws in other states. 

Status: Pending in House Judiciary Committee. See contact information above.

Senate Bill 135 Flag Salute: This nonsense would require all public school students to salute the U.S. flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance once per school day. This is not freedom, nor is it constitutional. It’s authoritarian. It goes against longstanding established law (West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624). I can’t believe we actually have to point this out to the legislature. 

Status: Pending in Senate Education Subcommittee. Write to the entire subcommittee at seducomm@scsenate.gov or follow this link.

H. 3758: Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act. The legislature actually expects us to take this seriously after they said DEI was a “failed experiment”  (Rep. Tim McGinnis, Myrtle Beach) and “divides us” (Sen. Sean Bennett, in my presence). I asked both my legislators (Bennett and Rep. Robby Robbins) if they were cognizant of the doublethink required to both support a bill that takes religious viewpoint discrimination seriously and dismiss DEI as they have continued to do. So far, I have not heard back.

Just for the sake of lip service: There is no law restricting students' right to pray during free time or to participate in extracurricular religious events and clubs. Expressly protecting religious speech during official school events is a violation of the First Amendment’s prohibition on establishment of religion, and is also unnecessary, as it currently exists and is tacitly accepted. 

Our public schools are not places of worship. Everyone is free to attend a place of worship of their choosing, or not, outside of taxpayer-funded, government-mandated school attendance—or to pay to send their children to private religious schools that do not (and should not) receive any public funding. Etc., etc., massive eye roll. 

Status: Passed the House; now pending in Senate Education Committee. See contact info above.

Conversion therapy ban in Columbia: Alan (Bleeping) Wilson has taken it upon himself to once again defend “religious liberty” by challenging Columbia’s ordinance banning conversion therapy for LGBTQ+ youth. Evidently, he thinks that a procedure that has been condemned by American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the National Association of Social Workers, along with other major health organizations is somehow excusable under the ever-widening umbrella of religious freedom.

Please sign the petition, authored by a licensed professional counselor, to stand up to our bully AG. Although the hearing was Tuesday, we must keep up the pressure on this issue.

H.4216 Changes to SC income tax law: This bill has been through multiple iterations after lots of pushback, and is expected to be taken up by the Senate early in 2026. (This is a great article by the SC Daily Gazette explaining the most recent version of the bill.) To its credit, the bill seeks to spread the burden of income tax across a wider population of higher income earners (currently 10% of filers pay for 65% of the state’s total income tax). Currently under this bill, 75% of filers would pay less or see no change. 

However, here are the questions we have to require our lawmakers to answer before we express support:

• Who exactly is not currently paying taxes—what income brackets? Which of those brackets specifically would this bill require to pay taxes going forward? 

• Does this bill reduce taxes only for the top income earners paying taxes, or does it primarily focus on alleviating the tax burden on low- and middle-income earners?  

• Does this bill include all top earners in the state? Does it add an unfair burden on earners in the bottom bracket?

• How are we going to manage with less tax money? A large number of South Carolinians earns less than a livable wage, based on percentage of more than 60% public school children on free and reduced lunch, about 60% of babies in the state born on Medicaid, and more than 60% of seniors in assisted care in the state on Medicare (source: SC State Rep. Wendell Jones interview on April 17 in The Upstate Tea of Frogmore Stew with Kathryn Harvey)

• Why are we trying to lower taxes instead of maximizing use of tax dollars we already have? We already have a massively high rate of relocation to this state that clearly suggests we do not need to incentivize people to move here over other Southern states with ostensibly lower income tax, and those who do should be fully paying into our overburdened education and infrastructure systems.

• Is this bill all about immediate gratification? What could the unintended consequences be? Please remember Act 388, which ostensibly reduced homeowners’ property taxes but has had negative consequences for business property taxes and school district budgets that have still not been resolved 20 years later. 

Status: Pending Senate Committee on Finance. Contact here or email Sean Bennett who is on this committee: sean@bennettscsenate.com