Scoppe: Charleston Sen Sandy Senn isn’t a liar; she’s the only reasonable option (2024)

Charleston Sen. Sandy Senn knew freshman Rep. Matt Leber was coming after her in the June 11 S.C.Republican primary, so she started collecting screenshots of his social media posts, his legislative bio, his Wikipedia entry.

Among the things that stood out were inconsistencies in his education history. Some entries said he attended a community college in his home state of North Carolina; other entries said he graduated with a two-year degree. Some put his graduation in 2001, others in 2003.

The differences look to me like earmarks of someone who is irresponsibly inattentive to details, but after the disturbing information she had amassed — more on that in a moment—Ms. Senn suspected fabrications. So she checked with Mitchell Community College, she said in a letter to the school’s president Wednesday, and she was told Mr. Leber hadn’t completed a degree.

Just to be sure, she sent a private investigator up to the college and got the same answer. When he didn’t get it in writing on college letterhead as he had requested, she hired an N.C. attorney to file a records request, and finally got the documentation on May 2.

Convinced she had it nailed— and honestly, demanding written confirmation rather than just relying on what the registrar told her and her investigator is going farther than the most obsessive-compulsive journalists would consider necessary— she launched a social media ad: More evidence, she said, that we can’t trust him.

You know the rest of the story, because it was on the front page of Tuesday's Post and Courier; the online headline was particularly devastating: “SC lawmaker Sandy Senn says challenger Matt Leber lied about college degree. He didn't.”

Anyone who read even the first few paragraphs recognized that Sen. Senn did everything right, only to have everything blow up in her face. The bad guy clearly was the college, which either displayed incompetence or else, as she implies, changed the facts after the fact. But to people who only saw the newspaper’s social media post with that headline, Sen. Senn was the bad guy.

When she was out talking to voters Thursday morning, she told me, she was getting asked why she lied. That was actually a blessing, because it gave her the opportunity to set the record straight.

Sandy Senn is not among my favorite senators. That group would include Republicans Tom Davis and Greg Hembree and— I never would have believed I’d one day say such a thing— my own senator, Democrat Dick Harpootlian. And a few others.

Among the things they have in common— and Ms. Senn shares these traits— are that they don’t inhabit the fringe of their party, they focus on real issues instead of culture war and gotcha politics, they’re willing to vote against positions that are popular with their political base, they work across party lines, and they don’t think compromise is an obscenity.

Ms. Senn can be grating, maybe even when she doesn’t mean to be. And I find some of her attacks cringey, on the trail and in the Statehouse; for instance, I wouldn’t have attacked Mr. Leber over the abortion allegations from his estranged adopted daughter. But her allegations about his degree and other matters in the public record are altogether different; they go to character, and that remains in question even after the diploma flub and even if you accept Mr. Leber’s version of his long list of run-ins with the law— run-ins he doesn’t deny but rather tries to explain away: It was a nasty divorce; it was a misunderstanding; I was shooting the ground, not at anyone; I wasn’t convicted; the police returned my confiscated guns.

How many people do you know who've had the police called on them as often as Ms. Senn has documented? Do you want those people writing our laws?

The domestic violence calls grew out of what clearly was a troubled marriage, although a lot of troubled marriages end without claims of violence. Still, Ms. Senn's documents include what appear to be another dozen police encounters since Mr. Leber divorced and moved to South Carolina.

The online magazine thearenasc.com quotes several of what it says are Mr. Leber’s social media posts, including some to trigger liberals and one where he says Donald Trump is too moderate. I was most disturbed by a 2020 post that isn’t at all salacious: “I think political combat is what makes us American. I despise very few things more than a moderate.”

The main thing Sandy Senn has going for her — besides the fact that she doesn’t consider those of us who aren't extremists despicable — is that the conservation community considers her one of its go-to legislators, a reliable voice for our environment. Most recently, she led the effort to defeat a budget proviso ordering state regulators to let some property ownersrebuild sea walls DHEC ordered removed, with taxpayers picking up the tab.

Mr. Leber, on the other hand, has had a light footprint in his year and a half in the House; he’s introduced three bills, none of which made it out of committee. I didn’t even recognize his name when he called me last fall to explain that I didn’t understand what authority the state constitution gives state legislators over local school districts. I managed not to laugh out loud.

A few days later, he showed up at a news conference with a couple of other backbenchers whose understanding of state law is not particularly profound: They were defending the Charleston County School Board for holding illegal secret discussions about getting rid of its hand-picked superintendent, and denouncing the mayors of Charleston, North Charleston and Mount Pleasant for making an extraordinary joint request that the board members get along, focus on the kids and do the public’s business in public. Seriously. And this guy wants to be a senator.

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