South Carolina’s legislative session came to a chaotic close following last-minute votes on a litany of bills, including a controversial ban on gender-affirming care for minors, a monument to a Black icon of the Civil War and limits on children’s ability to access pornographic material.

All of that was overshadowed by an eleventh hour vote by Republican hardliners to kill a top priority of legislative leadership and Gov. Henry McMaster.

With just several minutes left until the 5 p.m. hard deadline May 9, the conservative South Carolina House Freedom Caucus used a basic procedural maneuver to kill a sweeping state health agency restructuring bill that had been in the works for months — leaving members of the Senate incensed.

“Play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” Freedom Caucus chairman Rep. Adam Morgan, R-Taylors, told reporters afterward.

Plenty of other things did happen on the session’s final day.

The House and Senate struck a deal to form a committee to commemorate Robert Smalls, a South Carolina congressmen and a Civil War hero, with a memorial on the Statehouse grounds. They finalized legislation to prohibit minors from accessing pornographic content online. And they passed a controversial ban on gender-affirming care for transgender teenagers that the American Civil Liberties Union has described as “harmful and unconstitutional.”

But while the 2024 session is over on paper, state lawmakers leave Columbia with numerous major priorities still unresolved and the expectation they will find themselves back in the Statehouse within a month to finish up.

A proposal to reform the way South Carolina selects judges — lawmakers’ top priority this session — remains in purgatory after the House and Senate were unable to come to an agreement by the 5 p.m. deadline.

That bill will now go to a six-member conference committee consisting of three House members and three members of the Senate to rectify the differences between the two sides.

A sweeping energy reform package to expedite the conversion of a defunct Lowcountry coal-fired power plant to natural gas will also go to a conference committee after a reluctant Senate rewrote the proposal into a nonbinding resolution supporting new energy development.

And legislation banning the use of “prohibited concepts” in public school curriculum remains unresolved nearly a full year after a conference committee was appointed to debate it — leaving the fate of some of the most consequential bills discussed this year in the hands of a small group of lawmakers.

“I’m hopeful that once people sit down in the same room at the same table, that many of those differences can be worked out,” Sen. Shane Massey, R-Edgefield, told reporters after session.

The last-minute flurry of bills — and the lengthy post-session workload remaining — comes after weeks of questionable clock management from both chambers.

For several weeks, members of the House continually adjourned early amid an impasse over the energy bill, amassing a legislative backlog dozens of bills deep entering the session’s final days. Some bills, including a fentanyl bill favored by Senate President Thomas Alexander, R-Walhalla, died on the floor without a vote despite passing out of the Senate in February 2023.

Meanwhile, the Senate dedicated several days of its schedule in the session’s final week to debating legislation on topics like barring private businesses from mandating vaccinations to legalizing medical marijuana — discussions that ultimately went nowhere.

The penultimate day of session, which ran well into the night May 8, was also marked by chaos in the lower chamber of the Statehouse.

Over several hours, the House Freedom Caucus attempted to run several nongermane policy proposals as amendments to the state budget that sapped up several hours of lawmakers’ time.

Many were doomed to fail: Morgan, the group’s chair, attempted to run an amendment to the budget banning the distribution of forms mandated by the federal government to give individuals an option to register to vote.

Fellow Freedom Caucus member Jordan Pace, R-Goose Creek, attempted an amendment that would have required South Carolina to recognize all gold and silver currency — foreign or domestic — as legal tender, despite the fact it is the federal government that decides what currency is legal and what is not.

The latter effort elicited mockery from more moderate members like Rep. Micah Caskey, R-West Columbia, who donned a tinfoil hat to deliver remarks deriding Pace’s amendment from the dais.

“Everyone should point and laugh at the (SC Freedom Caucus),” he wrote on social media after the vote.

The group found other ways to be disruptive.

Later in the day March 8, Rep. April Cromer, R-Anderson, ground debate to a halt using an obscure procedural motion that would have forced House Reading Clerk Bubba Cromer to read every word of the nearly 300-page health department restructuring bill. It was a gambit Palmetto Promise Institute analyst Felicity Ropp estimated would have theoretically taken nearly 14 hours to complete.

The Anderson Republican eventually relented after nearly an hour of inactivity on the House floor. Her caucus would find another way to stall it.

With less than an hour left in session, Beaufort Republican Sen. Tom Davis — who led the bill — Sen. Margie Bright-Matthews, D-Walterboro, and Sen. Shane Martin, R-Pauline, ran more than half-dozen amendments to the bill, including several regarding vaccines that even some of Martin’s colleagues acknowledged could jeopardize the bill’s success in the House.

“Don’t push it too far now,” Sen. Nikki Setzler, D-Columbia, warned Martin 40 minutes before the deadline.

“I’m not trying to,” Martin replied.

Except he did.

When the bill came back to the more conservative House, members of the House Freedom Caucus objected to a motion to allow the bill to be heard within 24 hours of it crossing over — effectively killing it.

The architect of the bill-killing motion, Freedom Caucus member and Campobello Republican Rep. Josiah Magnuson, said the effort was personal.

All session, he said, House leadership had refused to weigh their policies seriously. Their members had been allowed to be openly mocked by colleagues on the House floor, he said, adding that someone had set up a red-haired puppet in the House chambers wearing a tinfoil hat; Magnuson has red hair.

“We’ve had bills for some of these issues filed since the beginning of last session,” Magnuson told reporters. “Some of them from the last session after COVID. A lot of this has been needed to be done for years, and it has never gotten any kind of attention until they got desperate.”

House Speaker Murrell Smith, R-Sumter, denied mismanagement of the legislation played any part in the bill’s failure, instead blaming the House Freedom Caucus for playing political games at the close of session.

“Holding hostage bills like that only harms South Carolinians,” said Smith. “It doesn’t harm the members that they feel weren’t nice to them. It doesn’t harm the institution. It harms real South Carolinians.

“We’ve got people with drug disorders with drug addictions,” he added. “We’ve got people with mental health issues. And because someone wants to have a bill that’s not related to health care restructuring and wants those bills enough, they will hold something hostage … that’s just a poor commentary on the state of affairs currently happening right now.”

Correction: A previous version of this article stated Robert Smalls was South Carolina's first Black Congressman. It was actually Joseph Hayne Rainey, who was elected to represent South Carolina's First Congressional District in 1870.