WHEN LEGISLATORS suddenly found themselves with extra tax revenue this year, House Ways and Means Chairman Bobby Harrell decided it was more important to spend $52 million of it eliminating the so-called “marriage penalty” and slashing the estate tax than re-hiring more laid-off teachers or further replenishing the diminished ranks of Highway Patrol troopers or prison guards.

He convinced the House to pass a bill committing the state to using surplus tax collections to make those cuts. When the Senate passed a budget that used the money to help pay for essential services, he led the House in amending it with the actual tax cuts. Then he led House budget negotiators’ successful effort to win Senate support for the cuts.

While he was doing all this, a Washington anti-tax group whose only apparent S.C. priority up to that point this year had been reducing that estate tax was putting the finishing touches on a TV ad campaign calling Mr. Harrell “the face of wasteful government spending in South Carolina.”

The ad drew harsh criticism from anti-tax groups in South Carolina, who were blindsided by what they considered an unfair, inaccurate and harmful attack.

What happened next was even more bizarre — and telling.

On Friday, the Washington group, Americans for Tax Reform, ran full-page ads in The State to thank “the South Carolina legislators who voted to cut taxes.” The ads, referring to Mr. Harrell’s $52 million cut, singled out Gov. Mark Sanford, House Speaker David Wilkins and Sen. John Courson, and listed 63 other legislators as “officials who fought for South Carolina’s hard-working families.”

Mr. Harrell’s name was nowhere to be found. Neither were the names of four of the other five budget negotiators, without whose approval the tax cuts could not have become law.

That’s because the ad wasn’t actually about cutting taxes. It was about the group’s “taxpayer protection pledge,” by which legislators agree to take marching orders from Washington. Americans for Tax Reform is best known for sponsoring the anti-tax pledge and then pummeling any signer who later supports a tax increase it finds offensive. Outside the Congress, South Carolina has been its biggest success: a nation-leading 33 percent of senators and 40 percent of House members have signed. But Mr. Harrell isn’t among them, so he gets no praise for cutting taxes.

Americans for Tax Reform chief of staff Damon Ansell acknowledges the newspaper ad was about the tax pledge. But despite his assurance that the Harrell attack was part of the group’s campaign against government-funded sports stadiums, there are indications that the pledge was key to that ad as well.

Last week, Mr. Ansell sent an e-mail to Mr. Harrell’s office recapping a phone conversation about the TV ad, which claimed Mr. Harrell “secretly grabbed over $5 million to sponsor a football game in Charleston.”

“Last night I said I would request a meeting with ATR’s executive council to discuss this issue,” Mr. Ansell wrote. “And one of the items that would come up is whether your candidate had signed the pledge. I said if he was a signer it sure would make for an easier discussion. Additionally I asked about the possibility of not funding the (football) stadium in future years.” (The full text of the e-mail is at www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/8755697.htm.)

Mr. Ansell says he was suggesting ways his group might look favorably on Mr. Harrell in the future, not offering to pull the ad in return for a pledge.

That may be true, but Rep. Bill Sandifer said that when he asked Mr. Ansell not to run the ad to begin with, he got the impression it never would have been made if Mr. Harrell had been a pledge signer. That impression was bolstered in his mind when the ad ran in Columbia, on days the Legislature was in town, and not in Mr. Harrell’s hometown.

“I think it’s a scare tactic” aimed at other lawmakers, he told me. “I don’t think it works, but that’s exactly what this is.”

Mr. Harrell says he has been overwhelmed by the support from Mr. Sandifer and other House Republicans, more than a third of whom told him they called the Washington group to protest. Several told him they were rescinding their pledges.

“I’ve never signed any of those pledges,” Mr. Harrell said. “I didn’t sign the anti-gambling pledge, the gun pledge. The only people I’ve pledged my vote to is the 33,000 people I represent in Charleston. I see my vote as an almost covenant with those people, and I’m not giving it to anybody else.”

But Americans for Tax Reform doesn’t want legislators answering to their voters. It wants legislators to answer to Americans for Tax Reform.

The group doesn’t simply oppose tax increases. Its goal is to cut taxes and government in the United States by half by 2025. To reach that goal, you could eliminate all spending on public schools and colleges in South Carolina, and eliminate Social Security and Medicare — or else eliminate all other state, local and federal spending. Take Mark Sanford’s word for it: You can’t get there by merely cutting waste.

The group can only reach its extremist goal if it can control the members of Congress and the members of the South Carolina General Assembly and every other elected official throughout the country.

But Mr. Sandifer, one of the most fiscally conservative members of the House, thinks the attack on Mr. Harrell could backfire. He certainly hopes so.

“We have an out-of-state group, not centered in South Carolina, and their representatives in South Carolina didn’t even know about this,” Mr. Sandifer said. “We’ve got people in another state trying to tell South Carolina how to do its business. And I think every single South Carolinian should be offended by that.”

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