[Original post from Tuesday, with updates noted below]
S.C. Speaker of the House Bobby Harrell has just released a letter calling on Gov. Mark Sanford to resign, which will surely provide the grist for this week's episode of the Sanford saga. (Harrell's comments are after the jump.)
It is worth noting, however, that the loss of public support from Harrell (never an old chum of Sanford's to begin with) is significant on its own merits. As Speaker of the House, it will be partly up to Harrell (in conjunction with S.C. Senate President Glenn McConnell) whether to reconvene the legislature this fall for impeachment proceedings. Further, if impeachment becomes contested in the House, Harrell can assign the resolution to any committee of his choice - perhaps determining in one decision whether the impeachment effort lives or dies.
Also of note: While in Myrtle Beach for the Republican caucus meeting, Harrell essentially stopped his party members from sending a large, caucus-wide demand for Sanford's resignation. Now that he's sent his own letter (pre-emptively?) I'm curious whether other members will follow suit.
[UPDATE] On Wednesday, 60 of the 72 Republicans in the S.C. House of Representatives sent Sanford their own letter, also calling on him to resign. All of the Republican representatives from Horry County (Barfield, Clemmons, Edge, Hardwick and Hearn) signed it, except state Rep. Thad Viers of Myrtle Beach. The 51 House Democrats have yet to weigh in, but it's widely assumed they would join any move to impeach Sanford. More: http://www.thesunnews.com/news/breaking_news/story/1059214.html
That's the politics. The substance of the issue is the growing sense that the two months since the discovery of Sanford's affair have seen little energy by the governor spent on anything other than himself - perhaps justifying the most vocal of his critics who early on said the revelations would render Sanford unable to govern.
(The Sun News editorial board, as we've pointed out, did not join those early calls for resignation, preferring to see instead whether Sanford broke any laws in the course of his affair. But we too are losing patience with the governor's seeming narcissism: his public schedule this week, for example, lists only three events, and they are all more stops on his apology tour.)
We've periodically asked the question, but I'll pose it again: Will Sanford finish out his term? If not, how much longer does he have in office?
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