SC Supreme Court Backs Florence GOP Into a Corner

The Florence County GOP Has Quite a Balancing Act Ahead of Them, As State Supreme Court Puts the Screws to Their Candidate Filing Claim..


    Put up or shut up.  That's in effect what the State Supreme Court has told the Florence County GOP in a complaint filed by Florence Democrats over claims that all of their candidates properly filed for office during the registration period.  In a 6-1 decision handed down yesterday, the SC Supreme Court has requested that the Florence GOP state under oath that the paper copies of the SEI form from the challenging candidates were made and handed in with the other paperwork.  The gauntlet has been dropped....


   In effect, the Supreme Court is putting a gun to the heads of the local party officers, and saying they have one last shot at being honest with them.  Picture the scene in 'Platoon' where they raid the village, and Tom Berenger is yelling 'Ai Kako Dao!!!' over and over. Tom is essentially the Supreme Court, and the FCGOP is the little Vietnamese guy.  Remember, Berenger ended up shooting his wife.... 


    Yes, we will use the pun - Bill Pickle and the FCGOP are in.... yeah - quite a pickle.  Anyone who has been watching the whole filing mess unfold knows that the FCGOP put on it's Facebook page that it did exactly what it was told by the SCGOP and SC Election Commission - a process that we all know was wrong.  Pickle even reiterated this on his radio show before the statement was released.  When the list of accepted challengers and disqualified ones came out, we had our suspicions, because the list by county looked like pointed shotgun blasts:  some counties were blown to bits (Horry, Pickens and Lexington for example), and others were crystalline. Florence seemed odd to us, because we had been hearing what happened for days - from them.  Yes, the whole ruling is unfair, but it's unfair to both parties, and it sure seems like the FCGOP played the Florence Dems. The problem is, it appears to have been illegal...


    The deadline for the FCGOP to take that oath , according to sources, was 12:00 today. Whether they met that deadline,we don't know.  After all, we ARE 700 miles away today.  The big question is what if they don't swear under oath?  Or what if they do?  If they do, there are a whole list of options - the worst of which could be getting charged with perjury to the SC Supreme Court.  There are lesser options, and like we say, we are not legal experts, so who knows what will happen.  The real drama of this is first will the FCGOP fess up and say they went by their own interpretation, or will they stick to their guns and possibly get their heads handed to them?  The evidence to us does not look in their favor.  Definite sources from two different forms of media are pretty solid evidence, but legal aptitude has never been a strong suit in Florence.  They like to see the way things ought to be,  and we can appreciate that.  However, the law is the law, and the law is how things ARE .  



    How it turns out is anyone's guess, but if I were a challenger in Florence County, I'd be getting my petitions ready... Stay tuned. In the meanwhile, we'll spare you the sappy Boy Band version, and give you the John Michael Montgomery version.  Don't ask what's up with with the Japanese subtitles - we have no idea....


As a follow-up, we got another call that the FCGOP has received a June 4th hearing date in front of the Supreme Court on this matter. According to what we are hearing, the key is an interpretation of the law, which FCGOP says includes a blurry interpretation of whether a candidate intending to file is considered a 'public official' before it.  Sort of like if you can no longer consider yourself a virgin if both you and a girl are naked and intending to have sex, but can't because her Mom walked in the room.......... The bigger question is that FCGOP reportedly didn't air this grievance in previous hearings.  All interesting stuff indeed.
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