The House raised the ire of the Senate on Wednesday when — at Gov. Mark Sanford’s urging — it tacked the governor’s plan to reduce the state income tax onto a bill on a different topic.

That set off a spat between the top leaders in the House and Senate, who took to the floor of their respective chambers to deride each other for mucking up the legislative process.

It also prompted a Sanford spokesman to endorse the House’s “bobtailing” — attaching unrelated matters to other legislation — just two months after the governor called it blatantly unconstitutional and threatened to sue lawmakers over the practice.

The House attached the billion-dollar tax-cut plan — Sanford’s top legislative priority — and three other matters to a bill that would dictate how local sales tax referendums should be operated.

“You got to have more imagination than the writers of Harry Potter to find all that germane,” or relevant, said Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston.

That angered House Speaker David Wilkins, who took the floor across the hall for only the second time in five months. He said the House must fall back to this strategy because the Senate’s glacial pace has meant no action on key House priorities since the session began in January.

“This is not the perfect way to do it,” said Wilkins, R-Greenville, “but, really, it’s the only option we have.”

It’s not uncommon, late in a legislative session, for ideas from the mundane to the sweeping to get tacked onto legislation they have little or nothing to do with. The practice forces legislators to take up matters they might otherwise avoid.

Sanford backed the House’s tactics on Wednesday. Spokesman Will Folks said the governor’s chief objection to the Life Sciences Act — the law he threatened to sue legislators over in March — was not the bobtailing, per se, but the lack of discussion of pet projects.

In Wednesday’s action, Folks said, the income tax plan and others had already passed House muster in a subcommittee, a full committee and in floor debate.

“The primary issue,” Folks said, “is one of whether or not the merits of a bill have been given the full and open discussion that frankly the taxpayers of the state deserve.

“What the governor is adamantly opposed to is the attachment of last-second pork bill amendments that never received any air time as far as discussion.”

That’s different from what the governor told lawmakers in a closed-door session in March, when he repeatedly said he believed the state constitution intended all legislation to be “single subject.”

“I’ve got to internally figure this thing out and say if the constitution says single subject, at the end of the day, in my gut, do I believe in my heart of hearts that this is a single-subject bill?” Sanford said then. “I don’t believe that.”

McConnell warned that tacking on unrelated items could slow the Senate down even more — or push senators to throw out good bills that were lumped in with bad ones.

But the House overwhelmingly passed the income tax plan, which had been stalled in committee. Despite the protestations from the Senate, the move greatly increased the odds that it could become law before the session ends June 3.

House members also agreed to tack another Sanford priority, charter schools, on a bill that would require grade-point averages to be printed on report cards.

Today, they plan to tack same-sex marriage restrictions, probate judge eligibility and revisions in lobbying laws on a bill raising penalties for attacking teachers — and send that over to the Senate as well.

Rep. John Graham Altman, R-Charleston, sniffed the air in the House chamber.

“We’re having barbecue brought in,” he said, referring to what he joked were pork projects.

But he said he approved of some of the measures, especially the income tax reduction, and would vote for them. “I’ve voted for larger bills. We don’t vote for them by weight.”

Reach Bauerlein at (803) 771-8485 or vbauerlein@thestate.com