South Carolina needs the kind of state government restructuring proposed by Gov. Mark Sanford and Sen. Glenn McConnell.

The difficulty they are having in gaining legislative approval illustrates the point. It shows a legislature clinging to the status quo -- a system dating to pre-Revolutionary War days that gives too much power to the General Assembly. The state Constitution of 1895 further cemented the state's unwieldy governance, and it's time for a change.

For America's ingenious system of checks and balances to work as it should, the three branches of government need power in roughly equal doses. That is not the case in South Carolina, where the executive branch is so splintered it kills government accountability and efficiency.

"Our outdated system -- in which South Carolina currently spends 130 percent of the national average on state government -- must be reorganized to run like a business focused on its customers, not its own interests," Sanford and McConnell wrote in an op-ed piece pushing reorganization.

They are not the first to make this observation. Over the past 80 years, there have been 14 proposals for government restructuring, according to The Post and Courier in Charleston. The only one that was killed came in 1993, following a major ethical scandal in the legislature. Gov. Carroll Campbell got 145 autonomous state entities, boards and commissions reduced to what is today 55.

The latest group to suggest a revamp was the Governor's Commission on Management, Accountability and Performance that last year identified scores of examples of duplication and fragmentation in state government. It cited more than 70 separate accounting systems that cannot share financial information between key agencies, and more than 8,000 buildings comprising 60 million square feet, with no central authority to make management decisions.

Sanford and McConnell are asking for two things:

They want the legislature to give the people a vote on whether to change the state constitution to reduce the number of constitutional officers. Today, nine elected offices share the powers of the executive branch. The governor proposes to make most of the positions, such as state superintendent of education, appointees to the governor's Cabinet.

They want the legislature to approve a slate of mergers within state agencies.

Both proposals have merit.

A state Senate committee last week all but killed the constitutional officer portion of the proposal. But it is not technically dead and it should be reconsidered by the committee and the full Senate. They should let the people decide. It is the peoples' constitution, not the state Senate's.

Meanwhile, legislative subcommittees are picking apart the suggested agency restructuring.

It should come as no surprise that few other states have such a Byzantine state government in which the chief executive officer often resembles a lobbyist begging favors of a mercurial legislature.

The trend is to make the executive officer more accountable. Greater efficiency and accountability is needed in this state.