SC’s GOP ‘sister senators’ say farewell: ‘This is what a Senate seat costs!’

Sen. Katrina Shealy, R-Lexington, holds up Wednesday, June 26, 2024, with white gloves the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award given last fall to the five bipartisan “sister senators” who helped block a near-total abortion ban. (Jessica Holdman/SC Daily Gazette)

COLUMBIA — The day after South Carolina’s last Republican “sister senator” lost her re-election bid, she proudly displayed the award that symbolized both why she lost and why she doesn’t regret any of her votes.

Giving her farewell speech at the Senate podium, Sen. Katrina Shealy paused to put on white gloves. Then she picked up the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award, given last fall to the five female senators who helped block a near-total ban on abortions in South Carolina and stood together in opposing the six-week ban that ultimately became law last year.

“I stood up for the right thing. I stood up for women. I stood up for children. I stood up for South Carolina,” she said Wednesday as the other four “sister senators” — two Republicans, one Democrat and one Independent — gathered around her in support.

“Here it is, and it’s beautiful. … Take a look!” she said of the sterling silver and crystal lantern engraved with the senators’ names. “This is what a Senate seat costs, and I’m proud of it!”

The award’s actual worth is somewhere between $35,000 and $40,000. But its value to the “sisters” is immeasurable.

Its future home is uncertain. The award has been in Shealy’s Senate office. But she’ll be packing that up soon.

She’s looking for a new home for the award, maybe at the State Museum or University of South Carolina. The women say they were told it’s too controversial to display anywhere inside the Senate or antechamber, though Senate GOP leaders deny saying that.

“We only have one, and there’s five of us,” Shealy told the SC Daily Gazette. “We’d raise the money for a pedestal or something to put it on under glass because it’s very expensive.”

Only one of the five women will return to the chamber next year.

Sen. Margie Bright Matthews, D-Walterboro, has no opposition at all. Sen. Mia McLeod of Columbia, a Democrat-turned-Independent, didn’t seek re-election.

It’s the three Republican women who knew bucking an abortion ban would draw challengers and provide fuel for nasty attack ads from the party’s right flank. All were defeated.

Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, whose caucus put money into Shealy’s runoff race, argued the GOP women did not lose due to their abortion votes alone.

“If you look at the campaigns of any of those three races, their opponents did a good job of painting them all as squishy and out of touch,” said the Edgefield Republican. “I may disagree with some of that, but I think their opponents did a good job of painting them in that light.”

Freshman Sen. Penry Gustafson of Camden got trounced in the June 11 primary by a 64-percentage-point landslide to Lancaster County councilman Allen Blackmon. Sen. Sandy Senn of Charleston, first elected in 2016, lost to freshman Rep. Matt Leber of Johns Island by a mere 33 votes.

Shealy, the longest-serving female senator and the chamber’s only chairwoman, was seen as the strongest of the three for keeping her seat.

She has by far the chamber’s most winning record: In the last session, 14 of her bills became law, not including the bills she co-sponsored. Two more bills she authored are expected to be signed into law in the coming days. And her long track record fighting for children earned her the nickname among her colleagues as the children’s senator.

That included serving as chief watchdog of the Department of Social Services since the deaths of several children in its care in her first term, which eventually led to the director’s resignation in 2014 and the agency settling a federal lawsuit. More recently, her committee’s scrutiny of the Department of Juvenile Justice, where she once volunteered, led to a “no confidence” vote in the Senate in 2021 of that agency’s director, who resigned later that year.

Last summer, Shealy told the Gazette’s editor she didn’t think her constituents would believe the name-calling and attack ads that she knew were coming.

She turned out to be wrong.

“My opponent spent the last six months lying about me and telling people what a bad job I’ve done, and it’s not true,” Shealy told her colleagues from the podium. “I’ve read billboards that said I was a ‘baby killer.’ I would never hurt a child.”

Ultimately, Shealy lost to attorney Carlisle Kennedy by 25 percentage points in the June 25 runoff after leading a three-way primary two weeks earlier. Shealy conceded early in the night, knowing as votes were being counted that Kennedy’s winning margin was too much to overcome.

Shealy’s primary runoff was the Senate GOP Caucus’ only loss of the night. It collectively put about $500,000 into four GOP runoff races.

“She was an integral part of the team. She was a very effective legislator,” Massey told reporters after senators adjourned Wednesday. “I’m very disappointed to see her go.”

Kennedy, the son of former state GOP Rep. Ralph Kennedy, did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the Gazette.

During her farewell speech, Shealy called out Personhood South Carolina, a group that seeks to outlaw abortions from the outset of pregnancy with no exceptions for victims of rape or incest or for fatal fetal anomalies. (The group was founded in 2015 by Sen. Richard Cash, R-Powdersville, who has long argued that a baby shouldn’t be punished for the father’s crime and that doctors’ diagnoses can be wrong.)

It was Personhood South Carolina that bought billboards labeling the GOP women “sisters for death” and created a website calling Shealy a liberal liar.

“To watch what Personhood SC has done to me is just cruel and unheard of, and I hope the lobbyists for those groups are happy with themselves,” Shealy said, noting that Cash left the chamber before she spoke.

Cash has said he resigned from the group after winning a special election in 2017.

In her own farewell speech, Gustafson said she never cried following her primary blowout. But she cried the night of Shealy’s runoff.

There were a few votes over the last four years Gustafson said she regretted. None involved abortion.

 “The easy route for me was to go along party lines, no matter, and vote ‘yes,’” she said. “Ultimately, obviously, I had to vote no on the final bill.”

Of the Republican women, Senn was the only one who had consistently voted against abortion bans for years, even before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and turned what had been a largely philosophical exercise into a real possibility.

“It was a gut punch to lose” by so few votes, Senn said from the podium.

Yet, she said, “I feel liberated,” as she passes along her Senate responsibilities and constituent requests.

However, she said, for the sake of the state, the Senate needs more balance, not just men to women but Republican to Democrat.

Most voters, Senn said, are moderates landing somewhere between the extremes of right and left, and she encouraged her colleagues to stand up against extreme proposals.

More legislation for a near-total ban on abortions is coming, she said, and “you now no longer have us to take the bullets for you.”

Perspectives gone

Asked about what he thinks about the Senate potentially having no GOP women next year, Massey said, “I’m not so much worried about the look as I am that I do think we need the perspectives.”

When Shealy won her seat in 2012, there were no women of either party in the chamber. She remained the lone female until Bright Matthews won a special election in 2015.

From 2003 through 2012, South Carolina ranked last nationwide in female representation in the Legislature, according to Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics.

This year, South Carolina’s ranking improved to 47th, after Tomeika Isaac Devine, D-Columbia, won a special election in January.

Next year, Bright Matthews and Devine could be the only two women in the chamber. There are women running for Senate in November. But all of them face uphill battles in districts considered safe for the other party.

“I think we get different perspectives when we have people of different background in the body,” Massey said. “We’re going to miss that, no question.”

Shealy concluded her farewell speech with a challenge.

“Which one of you will step up to the plate and take up what I’ve been doing for the last 12 years because everybody in here has their little niche?” she said.

“Y’all better suck it up and get busy is all I have to say.”

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