South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford attempted to defend payday lending with his veto of the H.3790 bill, but the SC House overturned his veto. (Photo: Wikipedia)
On June 7, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford issued a veto of H.3790, a payday loan bill that would have extended the payment term of the standard loans to an untenable 120 days or more while still requiring the same fees. Furthermore, H.3790 would have eliminated unsecured loans in South Carolina and outlawed the common practice of a customer presenting a lender with a post-dated check. However, S.C. Politics Today reports that the South Carolina House of Representatives has overridden Gov. Sanford’s veto. The bill also affected regulation of licensing fees for the state’s mortgage industry.
Why Mark Sanford said no to payday loan-crippling H.3790
In a letter to the state House, Governor Mark Sanford writes regarding his veto of the payday loan bill that
“Although this type of regulation is intended to protect the public, these kinds of laws ultimately decrease the number and type of available financing options and make it harder for new lenders to enter the market. In other words, consumers have fewer choices and the available options become more expensive. … Some people will benefit from payday–style loans and some will not, and we continue to believe that individual consumers are better equipped than a government bureaucracy to know whether a short-term loan is a wise decision in any given circumstance.”
Allow the people to decide
As state legislators are less likely than credit-constrained consumers to have ever had the need for a payday loan or similar loans with no credit check – whether they are unsecured loans or not – it seems more logical that consumers should be allowed to decide whether the payday loan is a good deal for them. Governor Sanford clearly sees the matter in those terms, even if his state’s legislature does not. Currently, the payday loan regulation in South Carolina limits borrowers to $550 at a time, and they can only have a single active loan. This activity is tracked in an electronic database.
Another bill, another overturned veto
Another overturned veto ventures into territory of Mark Sanford’s alleged history of impropriety with South Carolina taxpayer funds. The House nixed Gov. Sanford’s veto of a bill that would “allow information to be made public in a state ethics investigation of the governor when it indicates possible cause that a violation may have occurred,” reports S.C. Politics Today. The vote against Sanford’s veto of the governor investigation bill was a landslide, 102-2 in favor of overturning his veto. Sanford has gone on record as saying that he vetoed the bill because he wanted the language of that bill expanded to include all state lawmakers, not just the governor.
Sources:
State of South Carolina – Office of the Governor
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