Sanford's veto tactics questioned

They call it "rolling up."

It's a budget-writing tactic that has been in use for years but was perfected during Democratic Gov. Jim Hodges' tenure.

Republican House and Senate leaders would guard against the line-item veto by rolling up lists of expenses such as "travel" and "maintenance" into one big item like "operating expenses" -- a line so big and nebulous that it's tough to veto outright.

For a governor, an even more difficult type of bundling occurs in provisos, the one-year provisions where much of the budget gets written.

These are often long paragraphs, sometimes dealing with dozens of items with little relation to one another, from prescription drugs to indigent defense. Governors can only veto whole items, so if they veto an entire proviso, they'd lose stuff they wanted in addition to what they didn't.

Former Republican Gov. David Beasley tried to veto sentences within provisos. Senators took him to court -- and won. The state Supreme Court ruled in 1998 that governors could veto only items and sections of the budget but nothing else.

Enter Mark Sanford, a new Republican governor handed his first budget.

The Republican-led House and Senate had bundled a lot of items out of habit and strategy. Sanford disliked it and told them so in his veto letter:

"An unfortunate consequence of continuing to budget like this," he wrote, "will inevitably be the veto of large items or sections that include meritorious provisions, just to address objectionable matters

"I do not suspect any of us desire that outcome."

Sanford took a new tack. He tried a new definition of the word "item" -- taking it to mean distinct entities set off by colons and semi-colons. He left "prose," or whole sentences, intact.

Senate Finance Committee chairman Hugh Leatherman, R-Florence, said Sanford might be stretching it. "You have to accept all the paragraphs or none of the paragraphs."

As to whether he would challenge Sanford on the matter, Leatherman said, "I have to look at what he did and how significant it was."

House Ways and Means chairman Bobby Harrell, R-Charleston, sees Sanford's vetoes as ripe for a legal challenge.

"I don't think that he was allowed to go into a proviso the way that he did," Harrell said. "But for anything to be done about it, the General Assembly would have to decide whether to pursue it."

There's the rub. Harrell is not troubled by the substance of what Sanford vetoed, making a court challenge less appealing.

"The question is, should we challenge him over the procedure?"

Probably not -- this year, Harrell said.

But would it set a precedent if Sanford used his definition of an "item" and it went unchallenged in court?

"Your failure to challenge it doesn't preclude you from challenging it in the future," Harrell said.

As to the larger question of fairness, Sanford said it's not right to give him line-item veto then prevent him from using it.

"We are heading down a path that severely undermines this (veto) authority," he wrote.

But it's not a question of fairness, Harrell said. It's a question of what's within the law.

"It's clearly within the legislative prerogative how to write a proviso," Harrell said. "The Legislature is exercising the rights that it enjoys."