State senators reacted with concern, but not surprise, Thursday that Gov. Mark Sanford and House Republicans blame them for the legislative shenanigans known as bobtailing.

That practice of attaching unrelated items to a bill is at the heart of the contentious relationship between Sanford and fellow Republicans in the House and Senate.

Sanford has gone so far as to threaten to sue the General Assembly over the issue, although he backed off that threat after a heated private meeting with House Republicans on Wednesday.

During that meeting, Sanford and House leaders agreed that the real problem lies in the Senate, with its looser rules on the issue.

Senators took issue with that description Thursday.

“First of all, it’s inaccurate, and it’s unfair, and it doesn’t do anything to forward any progress,” said Sen. Tommy Moore, D-Aiken. “Will I be up tonight worrying about it? No.”

Sanford’s Republican colleagues in the Senate agreed with Moore, and said assigning blame is not a good idea.

“I don’t think anyone likes being made a scapegoat,” said Sen. Larry Martin, R-Pickens. “You get into this finger-pointing; I don’t know what good that does.”

Besides, it was the Senate that led the 2000 fight to end bobtailing in the annual budget bill, said Sen. Jim Ritchie, R-Spartanburg.

“And it does no good to try to hide behind pointed fingers,” Ritchie said, “when people are expecting us to move forward and address the serious issues facing our state.”

Other senators said the House is just as guilty of the practice and used the Senate’s current morass as proof.

For more than a month, the Senate has been bogged down in an on-and-off filibuster over a tougher seat-belt bill. The bill, however, originally dealt with driver’s licenses for the hearing-impaired. When the Senate sent that bill to the House, the House amended it with the seat-belt bill and sent it back to the Senate.

The seat-belt bill “is bobtailing at its finest,” Sen. John Kuhn, R-Charleston, said Thursday on the floor of the Senate. “We are the culprits of bobtailing? When we’re really in this chamber bogged down by the House’s bobtailing?”

Sanford has threatened to sue the General Assembly over bobtailing in a bill known as the Life Sciences Act. The original version of that bill dealt with offering tax incentives to certain biomedical and pharmaceutical companies that expand in the state. It later was amended to include a state-funded capital venture fund.

Both of those provisions Sanford supported.

But late in the 2003 session, it was amended again to include bond money for the state’s three research universities, a culinary institute at Trident Technical College in the Lowcountry and making USC-Sumter a four-year college.

The Senate is clearly responsible for that bill’s growth from tax credits and capital venture to a grab bag of other items, said House Majority Leader Rick Quinn, R-Richland.

The Senate sent the House a bill loaded with extras and the House had two choices: reject it or accept it.

“Bobtailing is an esoteric thing,” Quinn said. “One man’s poison is another man’s gold. To me the issue is they jeopardize a very important bill because of some special projects.”

Those extras are the provisions that Sanford opposes. He vetoed the bill in that version and the House and Senate quickly voted to override his veto and the bill became law.

But then Sanford questioned if it was constitutional, because not all of those pieces of the bill are related. He threatened to sue, but backed off after being told he would hurt his fellow Republicans if he did so.

The governor was wise to reconsider, Martin said, because Sanford would not win the lawsuit. If Sanford had sued, Martin said, it would have been about political posturing, not policy.

“People will make a judgment on who is posturing and who is acting within reason,” Martin said. “It’s called an election.”

Reach Gould Sheinin at (803) 771-8658 or asheinin@thestate.com