The South Carolina House on Wednesday gave key approval to a bill that would make the state the 49th in the country to pass a law allowing harsher punishments for violent hate crimes.
But the vote sends the bill to a familiar junction where it has died before. Republicans in the Senate refused to hear it last year, even at the urging of a survivor of one of the most heinous racist crimes this century — the 2015 killing of nine black members of a Charleston church during a Bible study.
