article from THE STATE newspaper in Columbia, S.C. on Sunday, October 27, 2002.

John Monk
Staff Writer - THE STATE

"We don't want anyone to have to go through what we went through"

In South Carolina, McConnell is the first among 46 state senators. As Senate president pro tem and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, his influence rivals that of Gov. Jim Hodges and House Speaker David Wilkins.

McConnell gets his power from his master of parliamentary rules. But he also forges coalitions with potential critics that make it hard for them to criticize anything he does.

He's pro-Confederate and highly conservative. But he has some black support because he backed an African-American history monument of the State House grounds. And he has worked for strong environmental laws, winning support from environmentalist.

McConnell also uses threats - and gets results.

Last year, after Howard Covington, chairman of the State Infrastructure Bank Board, made a flippant remark about the Hunley, McConnell called for Covington's resignation. Covington's offense? He deliberately called the Hunley by the wrong name and proposed, in effect, that McConnell sell the sub and use the proceeds to help build a new Cooper River Bridge.

Covington wrote a public letter apologizing, saying he was "proud of the efforts to raise the Hunley,"

When McConnell was angered earlier this year at a judge's decision, he began a campaign that resulted in the judge losing his election. (In South Carolina, judges are elected by the 170-member Legislature.)

McConnell has additional power over judges; he chairs a screening committee that decides whether a prospective judge can even run for a judgeship.

In recent months, the Hunley story has moved into a Richland County courtroom.

There, before state Judge G. Thomas Cooper, lawyers for the Friends of the Hunley are fighting a lawsuit that seeks to have that group declared a public entity.

It will be up to Cooper to decide whether the Friends of the Hunley is public or not - and therefore subject to the State Freedom of Information Act.

Lawyers for the Friends say the plaintiff in the case, Edward Sloan of Greenville, already has been given the documents he sought.

But Sloan's lawyer, Jim Carpenter, told the judge in a pre-trial hearing several weeks ago that the Friends - which has received $8 million dollars in public money - gave up the documents only after a lawsuit was filed. Carpenter said he hopes no one else ever has to file suit against the Friends to find out how public money is being spent.

"We

don't want anyone to have to go through what we went through" the lawyer said.