It’s not every day you catch a South Carolina superintendent of education trying to wriggle out from under tough questions by deploying what amounts to an old Brady Bunch bit.
“No, you didn’t say I couldn’t drive any car,” a triumphant Brady boy tells his angry, and improbably coiffed, parents in one episode of the 1970s-era sitcom. “You said I couldn’t drive our car. Those were your exact words.”
Yeah, we know. Nobody ever mistook the Brady dining room for the Algonquin Roundtable.
Still, it was considerably more amusing than Superintendent Ellen Weaver’s recent attempt to use the same “exact words” gambit to defend her office’s decision to hand school voucher money over to homeschooling parents.
Yes, Weaver explained to a panel of angry and increasingly incredulous state senators, the voucher statute did, in fact, explicitly prohibit vouchers for students in any of the state’s three legally sanctioned homeschooling programs.
But it didn’t say anything at all about homeschoolers who were not in one of those programs.
See, Senator? Not any car. Our car. Q.E.D.
Of course, it’s tempting to make Weaver the lone bad actor in this way, way off-Broadway Brady reboot. After all, it’s not like playing Twister with the English language is a new thing for the superintendent.
Besides, the furious senators were right on the merits. As Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, R-Edgefield, noted during the hearing, Weaver’s job was to execute the law faithfully — not to play billboard lawyer on behalf of the parents trying to find a way around it.
So yes, the senators who’ve called for a Legislative Audit Council investigation to get to the bottom of this mess are right. And their colleagues should join them in approving one without delay.
But let’s not let legislators completely off the hook here. Because the sitcom-level sophistry on this issue didn’t start with Weaver’s word games. Rather, it started when lawmakers decided to do some lexical gymnastics of their own to get around the state constitution’s plain-language ban on private school vouchers — and two S.C. Supreme Court rulings striking down previous voucher plans.
“No money shall be paid from public funds nor shall the credit of the State or any of its political subdivisions be used for the direct benefit of any religious or other private educational institution,” the constitution reads.
Pretty clear, right? But instead of asking the voters for a constitutional amendment to change that language at the ballot box, which might have been a hard sell, pro-voucher lawmakers decided to try to thread the constitutional needle with word games instead.
That’s why, under the latest voucher law, the money bounces around a Rube Goldberg-style contraption of funding streams and trusts and parent-directed accounts before finally landing in the private school’s hands — somehow making the benefit, lawmakers insist, “indirect.”
See, Justices? Not any car. Our car.
Who knows? Maybe the Supreme Court will buy it this time, if the law is challenged again. But when you’re playing those kinds of word games yourself, you can’t really expect the rest of us to be shocked — shocked! — when the education superintendent schools you on the rules of your own game.
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