Give governor room to maneuver on lt. governor

IT HAS NEVER MADE a lot of sense to have a separately elected state official — complete with a fully staffed office — whose job is to wait for someone to die. Yet that is precisely what the lieutenant governor of South Carolina does.

That’s technically the role of No. 2 officials in other states and in Washington. The difference is that in most places, the chief-executive-in-waiting is selected by the chief executive, who can give that person a real job to keep him busy while the chief executive is still breathing.

In South Carolina, we elect our lieutenant governor and our governor separately — sometimes from separate parties. As a result, it is rare for the governor to make the lieutenant governor an important part of his administration. The closest we came to having such a relationship in our state was 18 years ago.

And so lieutenant governors make up jobs for themselves — a practice that is particularly troubling now that state employees with real jobs, who don’t have to make up ways to keep busy, are being laid off.

Supporters point out that the lieutenant governor does have a job: He presides over the Senate. But the lieutenant governor is a member of the executive branch of government; that violates the separation of powers. (The rationale for the vice president doing it is to keep any one state from having too much power, an argument that doesn’t work on the state level.)

Besides, there is no need to pay a separate official to preside over the Senate. The House manages just fine with a presiding officer from among its own ranks. In fact, that system works much more effectively.

Now, thanks to the efforts of Gov. Mark Sanford and Senate President Pro Tempore Glenn McConnell and many of his colleagues in the upper chamber, we have on the table a proposal to correct these problems: Let the gubernatorial candidates pick their own lieutenant governors, to run on the same ticket, as in the federal system, and let the Senate pick its own presiding officer. The proposal, which will be put before voters this fall if the Legislature approves it, wouldn’t assign any specific duties to the lieutenant governor. But no governor who wanted to be re-elected would dare let his running mate sit around twiddling his thumbs for four years and drawing $40,000 a year in tax money.

This change should give taxpayers more bang for their lieutenant governor buck, eliminate some distracting tensions in the Legislature and make it easier for voters to concentrate on the important offices at election time, by eliminating the number of distractions.

The one flaw in the proposal is that it forces gubernatorial candidates to pick their running mates when they file for office. That allows primary voters to consider the entire ticket in choosing nominees. But it has the much greater disadvantage of ruling out the eventual primary losers as potential running mates. As we have seen at the national level, candidates don’t always pick one of their vanquished primary rivals as running mates, but sometimes they do, because sometimes the people who run for the top office are the most talented folks available. It doesn’t make good sense to automatically disqualify such people from consideration.

The uncomfortable fact is that the “A list” candidates usually run for governor, not lieutenant governor. If we’re going to improve the system, why erect barriers to improving this part of it? After all, the ultimate reason we have a lieutenant governor is so someone is available to take over if anything ever happens to the governor. We should do everything we can to make sure that person is the best qualified we can find.