Sanford is suing the legislature for overturning his veto of stimulus funds. Leaving aside the debate over the stimulus bill, does he have any grounds for doing this? Isn’t legislative override of executive vetoes part of the South Carolina Constitution (should Constitution be capitalized there?), and thus something he should be upholding? If this actually worked, wouldn’t somebody else have done it before?
He has no basis. I mean of course he could sue and hold his breath to he turns blue, but that’s about what it amounts to.
Well, Sanford’s argument isn’t that the South Carolina legislature can’t override a veto. His argument is that only the governor can request the stimulus funds, and so they can’t pass a law mandating he accept it. I don’t know if he’s right or not, but that’s his argument. As he put it:
But the bill explicitly had the language specifying that the legislatures could override the governor’s decision. Notice that Palin and Jindal, among others, made noises about it, but the AK and LA legislatures were happy to accept the money.
My own, mostly uninformed view is that I don’t think the Federal government should be meddling with the process by which state governments make decisions. If the Congress wanted governors to speak for their state, invest the power in governors to accept or reject stimulus funds. If the Congress thought both the legislative and executive should speak with one voice in requesting funds, that should have been the process. But to say that governors should make the decision, and then allow state legislatures a path to overturn the state’s decision, I think goes too far in intruding into the checks and balances of state governments.
I have no clue if there are any other laws out there which have these types of provisions, but I am not really comfortable with them. I’m very curious how the courts will rule.
I’m betting they’ll either reject with no comment, or say it’s an inherently political process.
The attempt failed in Louisiana:
Here’s an argument that that language in the bill is unconstitutional, which might be the argument that Sanford is relying on: