Memorial Day wasn't observed until after the American Civil War, but thousands of Americans, including hundreds of South Carolinians, gave their last measure in the Revolutionary War 250 years ago.

We're reassessing our endorsement of Solicitor David Pascoe for the Republican nomination, not because of anything we've learned about him, but because we've learned of an oversight on our part.

After the SC House used an internal rule to do an end run around our open-meetings law during the redistricting debate, we're wondering which state law it's going to exempt itself from next.

The SC Republican Party plans to sue to restrict access to GOP primaries, but the problem isn’t open primaries; it’s partisan primaries. Municipal-style elections would focus on candidates instead.

Our Legislature is effectively disenfranchising South Carolinians who serve in the military, by making it likely they won’t learn about and have time to request and return ballots in those special primaries.

Alan Wilson has no business reviving death-penalty talk in the Alex Murdaugh retrial, but the attorney general’s opponents in the SC governor’s race are misrepresenting what the court said about him.

The town of Awendaw, Charleston County and the SC Department of Transportation should add new signs, an RCUT or stoplight to improve safety at US Highway 17, Sewee and Fifteen Mile Landing roads.

Before South Carolina's $150M cost overrun on the $1.3B incentive package for Scout Motors, Richland County got a private party to pay its $1M environmental fine on the project. It won't say who.

North Charleston residents should support upcoming planning efforts to rejuvenate Aviation, Remount, Mall Drive and Reynolds Avenue in preparation for a rapid transit bus line along Rivers Avenue.

SC senators voted to remove Treasurer Curtis Loftis from office for incompetence after he refused to tell lawmakers about multibillion-dollar blunders. A new IG report confirms the problems, adds more.

Protecting the ACE Basin has been a South Carolina success story, but that success also brings a variety of development pressures, and its successful conservation will always be a work in progress.

It looked for a while like a struggling SC school district was going to welcome turn-around help, but that help gives the state control over hiring, and the Marlboro board just tried to defy that.

Dominion Energy's ongoing removal of about 200 palmetto trees in downtown Charleston shows the need for better communication, robust replacement and faster work placing power lines underground.

If you still think it makes sense to put unqualified politicians in charge of mundane but important county courthouse offices like clerk of court, we’ve got two words for you: Alex Murdaugh.

The SC town of Awendaw settled its dispute with a company owned by former Charleston County Councilman Elliott Summey, now an airport CEO, over a park the company was supposed to build but didn't.

As this disappointing legislative session nears an end, ethics reformers in the Senate are staging a last-minute effort to make a tiny improvement to South Carolina’s campaign disclosure law.

The city of North Charleston built a handsome museum near Tanger Outlets for a loaned collection of antique fire trucks and must reuse or sell the property now that the trucks are gone.

The Legislature’s Republican leaders have told us since last summer they weren’t going to redraw South Carolina’s congressional districts until after the 2030 census. Then President Trump called them.

Charleston County Council has surveyed the public and settled on allocations for its transportation sales tax referendum this year. Now it needs to write a ballot question with lots of specifics.

Perhaps like us you stopped paying close attention to the Upstate measles outbreak once you realized that nearly everybody was safe as long as they stayed away from an unvaccinated cluster in one county (a good thing), and the Legislature wasn’t about to do the logical thing and require kids…

Gov. Henry McMaster has overseen a major increase in conserved land across South Carolina, and state lawmakers soon might set a goal of protecting one third of the state by 2050.

The US Justice Department won’t decide which voters are purged from SC voting rolls under the agreement signed by the State Election Commission last week.

The board of directors of the South Carolina State Ports Authority have not included anyone from the Charleston region in the past several months, despite the agency's big footprint here.

Surely you’re as tired of reading about our legislators’ indifference to South Carolina’s stratospheric DUI death rate as we are frustrated at witnessing it. Yet it just keeps getting worse.

Charleston County zoning officials have flip-flopped on whether a proposed sand mine near a McClellanville school needs approval from its Board of Zoning Appeals, and the public deserves to know why.

Civil War worshippers accuse the left of "rewriting history" when it removes monuments, but South Carolina's Legislature is about to outlaw mentioning history about the war anywhere near statues.

South Carolina's jails, courts, law enforcement and health agencies must find more ways to prevent defendants with mental illness from languishing in jail or legal limbo without the help they need.

The Columbia-Richland County fire department is understaffed, and mold, plumbing and HVAC breakdowns plague firehouses were firefighters live and work after elected officials put it on autopilot.

The Charleston Housing Authority's next CEO will play a pivotal role in addressing the city's affordable housing problem, so there’s no room for a hire with serious allegations from his last job.

The SC Senate’s gift to the bar industry means DUI victims could be victimized again if bars and restaurants drop $1 million insurance policies meant to cover them when customers are overserved.

The Robert Smalls Monument Commission hopes to raise up to $2 million to erect a statue on the Statehouse grounds to one one of South Carolina's most significant 19th century historical figures.

It’s been a long slog to get lawmakers put restrictions on the private colleges that declared themselves authorizers and started dictating how many new charter schools SC taxpayers have to fund.

The city of Charleston and College of Charleston have moved too slowly to address the condemned parking garage at Wentworth and St. Philip streets. They must move quickly to raze and replace it. 

The S.C. Legislature is quietly poised to expand an important highway safety law. With a simple tweak, it can expand not only the protection the law promises but the protection it actually offers.

Charleston plans to begin its peninsula protection-Battery extension work with a short segment of city-owned land between the High Battery and Waterfront Park, a segment that can be completed sooner.

Testing that found Charleston restaurants implying their imported shrimp were local triggered shrimpgate and demands for the SC Legislature to pass a country-of-origin law. The House just did that.

The North Charleston Public Works Department received full accreditation from the American Public Works Association, a signal that the city wants to find new ways to improve its service to residents.

The SC Legislature continues to delay a law to make AI data centers pay for their electricity, limit water use and put sensitive areas off-limits. But cities and counties can still slow them down.

The SC Legislature must do more to help local governments in fast-growing areas. Lawmakers must pass a concurrency bill to give cities, counties a new tool to ensure infrastructure supports growth.

South Carolina leads the nation in people killed by drunk drivers per capita and per highway mile driven, because of our pro-DUI law, and the House is about to let the Senate's smart reform bill die.

Ensuring Johns and Wadmalaw islands remain rural will need support from landowners, as zoning and urban growth boundaries can be changed. But conservation easements offer lasting protection.

In the latest secret-government parody that’s unfortunately real, Greenville County Council approved a secret settlement to a lawsuit that said it violated South Carolina’s anti-secret-government law.

South Carolina's new Black River State Park may be remembered mostly for its scenic beauty and recreational offerings, but its creation also advances another important public good: flood protection.

S.C. Commerce Secretary Harry Lightsey learned a valuable lesson from his agency’s $150 million cost overrun on site preparation for the Scout Motors plant near Columbia: Don’t make open-ended commitments, as he did in 2023 when he promised that our state would spend whatever it took to turn…

Hanahan Mayor Christie Rainwater can't be pleased that her actions involving the city's real estate transactions with Carolina One, her employer, has led to a SC Ethics Commission hearing.

The SC Education Department says it has to let ‘unbundlers’ homeschool their kids and receive $7,500 vouchers after the Legislature thought it barred those students. Now senators want to fix the law.

The recent $24 million renovation of Finlay Park, one of downtown Columbia's most important public spaces, shows the value of reinvesting and maintaining our urban spaces.

SC senators are intent on preserving their version of the Civil War — and shutting down any efforts to tell a fuller, more accurate version of their favorite slavery-free fantasy.

Widening Delemar Highway in Dorchester County highlights the challenge facing governments as they try to plan for growth but also respond to those who don't want to see growth to begin with.

South Carolina’s law leaves charter schools more vulnerable to chaos —think the school suddenly closing — than charter students in other states, or kids in traditional public or even private schools.