COLUMBIA, S.C. - When the 2004 Statehouse session ends in a few days, legislators will go home to face voters and leave Gov. Mark Sanford to stare at empty Senate desks where much of his agenda was left undone.

Sanford's plans to restructure government, cut income taxes, limit lawsuits and reform health care and education aren't the only bills expected to die this week.

Dozens of Senate bills made it over to the House but were never brought up for discussion or sent to the floor for debate, including changes in child custody, pardon and identity fraud laws; but even more House bills are marooned in the Senate.

As Thursday's mandatory adjournment nears, legislators and the governor are expected to point at each other as they lay blame for what didn't get done.

Sanford is aware time is short, noting that his staff worked long hours last week to justify his vetoes.

"We're in a crunch time," he said. "I think perhaps the lights need to stay on a little bit longer so that we can forge through."

However, Sanford doesn't foresee calling the Legislature into a special session to finish work on his agenda or other issues. "Calling back ... basically suggests crisis. I don't think we're at crisis," he said.

The Republican governor's stunt last Thursday - bringing two squirming piglets to the doors of the House chamber to call attention to pork that remained in the state budget - prompted nearly an hour of reaction from the Senate that delayed taking up budget vetoes.

A day earlier, the House raced through 106 budget vetoes, sustaining just one of them and drawing rebukes from Sanford for a "reckless" lack of consideration.

House Ways and Means Chairman Bobby Harrell, R-Charleston, said that many vetoes threatened to gum up the works "when there are much more important issues that we need to be talking about."

House Speaker David Wilkins, R-Greenville, said the lower chamber has accomplished much during the two-year assembly: clarifying that employee handbooks aren't work contracts; a lawsuit reform bill; making it easier to establish charter schools; getting a bill to Sanford's desk that changes how regulations are imposed on small businesses; and passing Sanford's income tax reduction plan.

In all, the House has passed 13 of Sanford's top agenda items; just one of those has cleared the Senate.

"I'll be disappointed if many of the bills passed by the House passed earlier in the session were not dealt with by the Senate," Wilkins said.

For the most part, Sanford's priorities faced little resistance in the House, but in the Senate there's been virtually no progress.

To get around that, the House began passing some of Sanford's agenda items and other bills a second time by attaching them to bills that had cleared the Senate so they would leap to the top of the Senate's clogged calendar.

"We keep having to pass bills twice," Wilkins said.

Senators spent Tuesday and Wednesday mired in a debate over Sanford's plans to cut the state's income tax and weren't looking forward to dealing with budget vetoes.

A sense of resignation had set in.

While there were plenty of important bills to take up, "the world won't end if we don't do anything else," said Senate Majority Leader Hugh Leatherman, R-Florence.

The little piggies that went to the Statehouse with Sanford did little to win him much support, either.

Sen. David Thomas, R-Fountain Inn, had led the fight for Sanford's income tax plan but said it appeared to be dead after Sanford couldn't convince Democrats to get the issue to a vote.

The vetoes and the pig incident show how differently Sanford works with legislators than his predecessors, who used well-defined, targeted vetoes and built support to sustain them, Thomas said.

With Sanford, its pigs and polls.

With his vetoes bashed in the House, the governor cast himself as standing up "to these bad guys and brings pigs into the chamber," Thomas said. "The problem with that is it works for the polling numbers, but it doesn't accomplish the purpose" of "winning the day on his major issues."