South Carolina doesn't have the best reputation, like Clarence Thomas

South Carolina is having a moment. It has the nation’s best women’s basketball program. It has not one but two people running for president.

South Carolina has a Republican lawmaker who suggests women wanting abortions should ignore court rulings prohibiting them, and another Republican lawmaker suggesting women who have abortions be put to death.

Democrats, in perhaps the only thing they’ve done lately that made sense, have moved South Carolina atop its primary election calendar on the basis that it will be “more representative” than Iowa and New Hampshire. If you consider that majority-America is crazy, then mission accomplished.

But can I remind anyone that the last time South Carolina got this much attention was 1861, and for the health and well-being of our nation, 1861 warn’t such a good year.

So maybe we can just pump the brakes on South Carolina.

When South Carolina seceded from the Union, Judge James Petigru remarked that his home state was “too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum."

South Carolina then was led by Sen. John C. Calhoun, a litigious nitpicker of whom it was said could never pen a successful love poem because every sentence he ever wrote began with “whereas.”

Calhoun was known as the “cast iron man” for his backbone, something that cannot be said of the state’s current senior senator, Lindsey Graham, who, when pressed to testify about his meddling in Georgia elections, sought the protective enjoinment of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Thomas, we now know, has his own issues, being accused of failing to report lavish gifts from a benefactor … something the justice said he was not aware he needed to do. Maybe I’m coming at this from outer space, but — he’s a judge, right? Isn’t knowing the law, like, kind of his job? This would be like if Tom Brady came out tomorrow and said he never realized there was a rule against intentional grounding.

In a sugar-coated documentary, Thomas purports to be a simple man of the people, with a preference to hanging out in — I am not kidding — Walmart parking lots.

So it must distress him terribly when he is, presumably against his will, jetted around the world to exotic vacation resorts by a far-right billionaire benefactor.

The latest: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been reporting income from defunct real estate company: report

One of these resorts is Topridge, an Adirondack estate once owned by Marjorie Merriweather Post, better known for creating Mar-a-Lago.

A couple of years ago, I was sitting with the owner of a small hotel named Roger who claimed to have bought Topridge from the Post estate — also at the auction was some guy named Donald Trump, and rather than compete, the two decided to divide the spoils. Roger would take Topridge, while Trump got Mar-a-Lago.

Roger said he had made his money selling hot dogs, and done well enough to afford this transcendent lakeside Great Camp, a diamond of luxury in the middle of a remote wilderness.

Salted into his soliloquy were references to his friends Michael Jackson, President Gerald Ford et al., and a whole list of accomplishments and adventures too numerous to mention.

My contribution to the conversation was the assorted “uh-huhs” and “um-hms” of a disbelieving person who really has nothing to add to such a fantastic tale and is only hanging in there to see where this story would end up.

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By this time we were low on coffee, so I followed him into a cluttered motel office to refill. He continued to chatter away, but I wasn’t hearing any of it because I was too busy noticing all the pictures on the wall with Roger hanging out with Michael Jackson, Jerry Ford, Elvis and a truly incredible cast of famous characters.

Later, hunting through Wikipedia, I found that Roger had indeed owned Topridge for a while, something that ultimately proved too overwhelming for his tastes. Unlike Thomas, he really was more of a Walmart parking lot kind of guy.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Palmetto State, Supreme Court justice getting their 'moments'