Lancaster’s Norrell on Haley’s State of the State: ‘We’ve been duped’

Now Mandy Powers Norrell knows how Nikki Haley feels.

A week after South Carolina’s governor delivered the official GOP response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, it was the Lancaster County representative’s turn Wednesday to step into the spotlight for the official Democratic response to Haley’s State of the State.

Norrell said she was humbled to be picked to give the speech Wednesday to a statewide audience on public radio and TV, but even she was surprised at the reaction the announcement received.

“I didn’t realize just how big a deal it was until it went out” on Tuesday, Norrell said before the broadcast. “I got home and saw I had more tweets and retweets than I have since I first opened my account years ago.”

Norrell pre-taped her response to the governor’s address at a Columbia ETV studio on Wednesday afternoon, before Haley delivered her sixth State of the State address since she took office in 2011. Norrell compiled the 11-minute address with 48 hours’ notice, not in response to Haley’s future remarks but working off an outline of the broad themes the party wanted to address.

The speech opened by describing Norrell’s and Haley’s similar backgrounds in rural South Carolina 25 years ago. “Per-pupil funding in our schools was at an all-time high. Our roads and bridges were some of the best in the nation. Our neighbors had jobs with reliable health insurance and stable retirement plans.”

Today, in contrast, Norrell asked, “Are you proud of our public education system? Are you satisfied with the condition of our roads and bridges? Are you confident that if you got sick, you could afford the treatment?”

And Norrell had a culprit in mind to blame for that perceived decline.

“During that time, Republicans have been in almost total control of state government,” she said. “We’ve been duped.”

In her response, Norrell laid out a vision of what would happen if the situation were reversed. She called out Republicans for resisting a state Supreme Court ruling in 2014 that ordered a more equitable distribution of funding to rural school districts.

“A Democratic Legislature would invest in our public schools – the way we did 25 years ago,” she said.

On Wednesday, Haley called for 1 percent of the state’s bonding capacity to be set aside to fund needy school districts in the state.

On economic issues, Norrell claimed that “while Republicans talk a big game about economic development,” their preferred policy has been to hand out tax breaks to attract large corporations from outside the state without helping South Carolina’s small businesses.

“What if we didn’t have to hand out hundreds of millions of dollars in tax incentives to convince companies to move to South Carolina?” she said. “World-class public schools, a healthy workforce, and safe roadways would be far more persuasive incentives than the hundreds of millions in tax dollars our citizens are paying to recruit these companies now.”

She also blamed Republicans for the Legislature’s failure to pass a roads bill in the 2015 session and for turning down “$11 billion in federal funds that would have provided health care for 300,000 of our citizens who don’t have it now.”

“The definition of insanity,” she said, “is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”

An attorney, Norrell has represented District 44, which covers much of Lancaster County, since 2012. She was previously the Lancaster city attorney and ran for the District 16 Senate seat in 2008, losing to future Congressman Mick Mulvaney. She has a bachelor’s degree from Furman University and a law degree from the University of South Carolina.

This story was originally published January 20, 2016 at 9:17 PM with the headline "Lancaster’s Norrell on Haley’s State of the State: ‘We’ve been duped’."