SC’s Governor Sanford Still Stuck on “NO!”
It’s been a couple of weeks since Governor Mark Sanford (R-SC) was all over the news. His insistence that he will not apply for, nor accept, some $700 Million of federal stimulus Title XIV money for his state has rallied both fiscal conservatives in support and pretty much the rest of the world in opposition. I wrote here about it at the height of the controversy, suggesting that the Title XIV funds, related as they are primarily towards increasing the effectiveness of state public schools, ran counter the Governor’s enmity towards public education, as opposed to his promotion of private schools, vouchers, etc. Why would he support funding for improving the public schools then? I still believe his primary motivation is not federalism or anything that ennobling; Sanford simply cannot afford to improve public schools at the expense of his “free market” choice: charter schools. My God, suppose South Carolina’s abysmal academic records improved? Suppose South Carolinians began to believe in the public system?
In any event, time marches on. The state legislature and the governor continue to play a spirited game of rugby and neither side is giving an inch. Since my last writing on this topic legal opinions have supported the governor’s power to constitutionally refuse to accept the funds in question. Firstly, a nonbinding opinion of the South Carolina Attorney General sided solidly with Governor Sanford and an earlier Congressional Research Service legal memorandum expressing severe reservations about the power of the legislature to override the governor and itself accept the Title XIV funds.
[i]n the government of [South Carolina], the legislative, executive, and judicial powers of the government shall be forever separate and distinct from each other, and no person or persons exercising the function of one of said departments shall assume or discharge the duties of any other. . .
Accordingly, only the courts possess the power to resolve this dispute between the coordinate and coequal legislative and executive branches. Should the Legislature choose to accept these funds on behalf of South Carolina, and appropriate such funds to the uses required in the Recovery Act, and should the Governor choose not to apply for and utilize the funds – as federal law gives him the power to do – a constitutional standoff would be created. Resort to the judiciary would be necessary to resolve the stalemate.
Even the Obama administration agrees. agrees. A March 31, 2009 memorandum from Peter Orszag, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), concluded:
However, for a State to access its allocation of the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund, the Governor must submit an application to the Secretary of Education, and there currently is no provision in the Recovery Act for the State legislature to make such an application in lieu of the Governor for a State’s allocation of the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund.
The Governor’s compromise is, to most, no compromise at all, but simply another exercise in GOP deconstruction of government under the guise of crisis. Sanford proposes that the state submit a budget that offsets the fiscal stimulus funds represented by Title XIV by debt reduction and cuts in other parts of the budget, a budget already under water by $1.1 Billion. In addition, he insists that the legislature accept his $270 Million package of budget reductions, with further cuts to be found later on to offset completely the $700 Million in Title XIV funds.
“Late Monday night, GOP Senate Finance Committee Chairman Hugh Leatherman said of the governor’s plan: “A small portion of the debt, we might be able to do that. If he’s talking $700 million, he’s whistling ‘Dixie.’’ Said Democratic Sen. John Land,’The governor of this state has put us in the most unnecessary crisis in the time I’ve been here,’ (elected to the Senate in 1977). “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen and it makes no sense.”
With the hope for a political or judicial resolution to this problem remote, it’s time for the people of South Carolina to do something they learned about the hard way in the 1960s: march. March on the Governor’s mansion, sit in at public parks, expand the Sanfordville from a dozen residents to a few thousand. The political system in South Carolina, despite a determined effort by both Democratic and GOP legislators, seems defeated by a single intransigent man still pushing a supply side belief system in direct defiance of the mass of people in his recession-riddled state. Perhaps a mass of people on his front lawn might convince him otherwise?
