After the meeting, Sanford said he decided to back off threats to sue the Legislature over a massive economic development bill, the Life Sciences Act.

Sanford and about 40 House Republicans met for more than an hour to discuss his challenge of a far-reaching spending bill passed by the General Assembly last month. Sanford vetoed the bill, and the Legislature voted to override the veto. The governor threatened a lawsuit.

The session Wednesday in an auditorium turned into a verbal sparring match, House members said afterward, with some lawmakers contending Sanford had been less than truthful.

"The members of the House came out of there far more distrustful of the governor than they were when they walked in," said one lawmaker who was at the meeting but asked not to be identified.

One of the points of controversy centered on when House Speaker David Wilkins asked Sanford if he was calling a news conference today to discuss the possibility of suing legislators over the bill. Sanford reportedly told Wilkins he had not made up his mind.

A short while later, lawmakers in the meeting began receiving e-mails from the governor's press office announcing that a news conference had been scheduled for today in Columbia, a lawmaker said afterward. Sanford was confronted about it.

"People accused the governor of manipulating the media for his own purposes," the lawmaker said.

Some time after the meeting, the governor's press office sent out an e-mail to the media saying there would be no press conference today. A spokesman said the earlier message had been sent by mistake by the governor's communications office.

"We're certainly not giving up the option of taking this thing to court," Sanford said in a statement. "Based on feedback from folks in the General Assembly this afternoon, though, I'm taking them at their word that there is a willingness to fix this thing legislatively.

"I wanted to get their unbridled thoughts on this matter," said Sanford, whose suit would challenge the constitutionality of putting unrelated items into the bill. Sanford was upset that the Life Sciences Act, dubbed the "kitchen sink bill" by some included provisions to expand the University of South Carolina-Sumter to a four-year school and to create a four-year cooking program at Trident Technical College.

Sanford called the bill "politically driven, pork-barrel spending."

The General Assembly easily overrode his veto two weeks ago.

Wednesday's meeting was thought to be a fence-mending exercise about the bill, but after the hour-long talk, it was clear that many House members left feeling every bit as angry as when they went in.

"We are very disappointed, frankly, in what we heard today," Wilkins, R-Greenville, said afterward. "We believe there are no merits to the lawsuit. He will not prevail."

Sanford said after the meeting that his goal was to fix the process to protect taxpayers.

"If there's a willingness to achieve that objective on the legislative side of the equation, then I'm certainly willing to give that process a little bit more time before moving forward with a legal option," the governor said.

The "single title" section of the state constitution stipulates that every act or resolution that carries the weight of law must relate to only one subject. Legislators are famous for connecting seemingly dissimilar issues in pieces of legislation.

Click here to return to story:
http://www.charleston.net/stories/040104/sta_01gov.shtml