The Friday Five 1.3.20

First and foremost, Happy New Year!  Here are a few articles you may missed this week. Take a few minutes and get smarter before church coffee hour this Sunday… 

1. South Carolina is 6th-fastest-growing state. South Carolina is now home to about 5.15 million people after adding more than 64,500 new residents from July 2018 to July 2019, according to the final set of population data released by the Census Bureau before the Census later this year.
2. President Trump will sign the “phase one” trade deal with China. This will hopefully be the beginning of the end of the trade uncertainty, because tariffs hurt the US economy and the Upstate’s export economy.
3. Impeachment Drags John Roberts Into Spotlight: “The 64-year-old chief justice who famously said judges should simply call balls and strikes will now hold influence over the most bitterly partisan impeachment trial in modern American history, a situation more akin to umpiring a bench-clearing brawl.” For someone who prefers to stay in the background, the upcoming impeachment trial will bring Chief Justice Roberts into the limelight, whether he wants it or not.
4. Political news from 2019. A great political recap of the year’s events in South Carolina politics. We’ll forgive you if you didn’t remember all of these from our weekly updates…
5. How does SC spend tax money? This article is a decent public insight into how some projects get funded in the state budget. Most of what is in this article is a job (The article was a little before Christmas, but we’ll include it here anyway because we know you were busy trying to get the G.I. Joe with the kung-fu grip.)

BONUS: South Carolina’s best political quotes of 2019. Worth a read. A laugh. And maybe a cry. “I could never get women like that to attend a party of mine.” – Sen. Tom Davis.