An ancient Greek proverb speaks of the mountain that labored mightily and produced a mouse.
Popularized in Aesop’s Fables, it’s a shorthand way of describing a particular flavor of human foolishness — the kind that pours massive amounts of energy into silly, small-bore causes that aren’t worth a fraction of the effort.
Enter freshman S.C. GOP Sen. Matt Leber of Charleston County, whose herculean efforts on behalf of public oath-taking have finally produced the legislative mouse he’s spent the past several weeks fighting for. Sort of.
It all started, as these things so often do in South Carolina, when a Leber crony suddenly appeared on a local board — in this case, the Charleston County Library Board.
At that point, the crony in question — attorney, gun-rights activist and former Leber campaign manager Graham Horsman — started making a public stink about the fact that volunteer board members don’t take the oath of office contained in the state constitution.
Heaven forbid!
It’s at this point that a reasonable lawmaker might have looked at the facts — no volunteer library board in the state takes the constitutional oath — and told his mouse-hunting minion to stand down.
But the extreme Leber — who defeated former Sen. Sandy Senn in last year’s GOP primary by running somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun— didn’t get where he is by being reasonable.
And so we were off to the races in yet another divisive, bone-dumb debate about who’s a good American and who’s not, with Leber demanding that Charleston County Council fire nine of the board’s 11 volunteer members.
“No individual who refuses to swear allegiance to our nation has any place holding a public office in the great state of South Carolina,” Leber blustered in a March 3 letter to council members.
At which point, county council began hemming and hawing its way toward the right answer over the course of several meetings, eventually telling the senator — respectfully, of course — to go pound salt.
“No one here is saying we don’t believe in the oath,” County Councilman Joe Boykin said on March 20, after council decided to defer action until the state came up with a uniform policy. “We’re only saying that our clerk shouldn’t bear the responsibility for the entire state of South Carolina to set precedent.”
But Leber still had one more card to play — a hastily-written budget amendment threatening to cut off state funding for any county library system whose board members didn’t take the oath. Which of course passed overwhelmingly with the Senate supermajority being what it is and no one really having any courage to say no to something stupid. And this nonsense — again, of course — had to be replaced by a new amendment the very next day, authored by some of the grown-ups in the chamber, that bothered to get the notification and process details right.
So, in the end, Leber got his way — even if the adults had to intervene to make his budget ploy work.
And that’s fine. Swearing an oath to the Constitution won’t hurt anybody. Just as it won’t create one single middle-class job, make one neighborhood safer or improve one public school classroom. Or any of the other things you might think a state senator would spend his time on.
But on this issue, at least, Leber birthed a mouse. Hooray!
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