Sunday, Jun. 07, 2009

Scoppe: Mark Sanford and the Promised Land

MARK SANFORD first tried out the Moses analogy on me a few years back, after I suggested that perhaps a different strategy was in order for convincing legislators to give our governors the type of executive-branch authority that the rest of the nation’s governors take for granted.

Just as Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt but then died in the desert, leaving it to Joshua to lead them into the Promised Land, Gov. Sanford said, it might be that he leads our state just to the brink of governmental restructuring but must hand it off to his successor to actually get the Legislature to go along with the plan.

It seemed to make some sense at the time: He was talking more about gubernatorial authority than any governor since Carroll Campbell. And in this conversation, he was pledging to use his considerable war chest and bully pulpit to get civic groups and individuals fired up. (Little did I realize that what he would get them fired up about wasn’t restructuring government but dismantling it.)

The morning that Mr. Sanford filed a federal lawsuit challenging the law that requires him to request federal stimulus funding, he trotted the analogy back out. He told me that his fights with the Legislature had “raised awareness that we’ve got a strange structure.” He acknowledged that “maybe we lost on some small things” — which seemed quite a change of tone from his complaint, just minutes before during our discussion of his lawsuit, that “people say you need to show leadership, but each time you do, you get power taken away from you.” Then he started talking about Moses and Joshua.

And this time, the analogy fell flat.

Moses merely failed to lead his people across the Jordan into Israel. Mr. Sanford has driven us back to the Red Sea.

There’s no question that the governor has caused some anti-government folks to add “weak governor/ridiculous Budget and Control Board/power-hungry Legislature/too many constitutional officers” to their litany of criticisms. Meanwhile, the Legislature has stripped him and future governors of the authority to fire their own appointees to the Santee Cooper board. And the Ports Authority board. It has shot down several restructuring initiatives that had emerged from other quarters and actually seemed to be picking up steam — chiefly the proposal to replace the DHEC board with a direct gubernatorial appointee to run the agency.

By the end of this year’s legislative session, even the House, which always has at least paid lip service to restructuring, would have none of it. It refused to take a single action concerning the state’s bankrupt unemployment compensation trust fund because the bill also turned control of the Employment Security Commission over to Mr. Sanford.

And Senate President Pro Tempore Glenn McConnell, who throughout the Sanford administration had paid lip service himself to more gubernatorial authority (and might even have been a bit sincere), was back to playing his Campbell-era role as Chief Defender of the Legislative State, attacking the governor’s lawsuit with a broadside against the whole idea of government restructuring. “For seven years,” he declared in e-mails blasted across the state, “Governor Mark Sanford has worked tirelessly to increase his power and the scope of South Carolina’s executive branch of government. While working to centralize power under one individual, the Governor has continuously attacked the General Assembly for what he describes as liberal tendencies.”

Perhaps most troublesome is the Rubicon the Legislature has crossed in slicing off chunks of gubernatorial authority when the governor exercises it in a way that displeases lawmakers.

Lawmakers never have been particularly interested in giving additional power to governors. But at least they used to let governors keep what they had. It was actually Jim Hodges who first used the power many lawmakers didn’t realize they had given governors to replace members of the Santee Cooper board. But the efforts to rescind that power fell flat throughout his entire term. They only succeeded after legislators got to know Mr. Sanford.

When Mr. Sanford removed one of his appointees to the similarly configured Ports Authority board, there was no similar hesitation to act. Lawmakers took just two sessions to strip him — and those Joshuas to come — of that power as well.

With each power grab, the bar is lowered, the retribution swifter. After Mr. Sanford told SLED last fall to stop manning security checkpoints to the State House garage, the Senate passed a bill to kick the agency off the grounds and create a whole new Capitol Police Force. It probably won’t happen this year, but an extraordinary measure approved by the Legislature makes it possible to pass even now that the regular session has ended.

When Mr. Sanford’s Commerce Department made plans earlier this year to save money by trimming the sails on the state’s air fleet, lawmakers slapped a proviso into next year’s budget moving the Aeronautics Division beyond his grasp, under the protective wings of the Budget and Control Board that he chairs but has no power over.

Of course all of that pales in comparison to the granddaddy of all acts of retribution — passing a law that explicitly orders a governor to take an action that he has repeatedly and vocally refused to take. As the breathtakingly fast, unequivocal and unanimous Supreme Court ruling reminded us all Thursday, the Legislature has always had the authority to do this — and I believe the governor left it no choice but to act this time — but I can’t recall a time anything like this has ever happened.

Wild animals become far more dangerous after they first taste human blood, because they lose their fear of humans, and they develop a taste for that blood. In provoking their attacks, Mr. Sanford has turned our Legislature into a blood-thirsty pack of wild animals, which will not hesitate to strike again.

Barring some extraordinary and entirely unforeseeable changes, the governor’s office that Mr. Sanford leaves will be much weaker than the one he entered in 2003 — and very likely even weaker than it is today.

And the Promised Land is nowhere in sight.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com.

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