Who's in charge?

COLUMBIA -- Television cameras focused on two men standing in the state Senate chambers as they prepared to announce the biggest economic investment in South Carolina's history.

Senate leader Glenn McConnell stood beside lead budget writer Sen. Hugh Leatherman at the podium. Leatherman, in a deep voice only slightly less garbled and gravelly than usual, welcomed the aeronautic giant Boeing Co. and its projected 3,800 jobs and $750 million investment.

Celebration uncorked around Leatherman and McConnell, and across the lobby as House Speaker Bobby Harrell simultaneously delivered the news to his chamber.

Conspicuously missing from that landmark announcement Oct. 28 was Gov. Mark Sanford.

'Nobody' runs the state

The event illustrates something painfully true for Sanford: He's not in charge.

When he recently was asked who runs the state, Sanford, weary from seven years of battles with the Legislature and politically broken from his sex scandal, uttered this revealing reply:

"Nobody."

What he means is no single person is in charge. The governor in South Carolina is not a traditional chief executive with extensive authority.

Instead, a triumvirate of legislators -- call them The Three Legiteers -- hold much of the power.

In the footsteps of their predecessors Marion Gressette, Edgar Brown and Solomon Blatt, McConnell, Leatherman and Harrell draw their power from carefully won political alliances and decades spent building influence and trust.

Power in the state Legislature is rooted in seniority, loyalty and traditions dating back to the post-Reconstruction era of the late 1880s. The House and Senate are elite boys' clubs and Sanford has never been invited inside, in part because of the hostile manner in which he pursued the cornerstone of his governorship: an effort to shift power from the Legislature to the executive branch.

Cordial in the halls

Moments after the Legiteers made the Boeing announcement that day in October, Sanford climbed the stairs to the rotunda of the Statehouse outside the Senate chamber.

He asked the cameramen and the scribes to pause long enough for Leatherman and McConnell to come into the lobby.

When they did, Sanford shook their hands and thanked them as publicly as he could for their success in snatching Boeing from Seattle, an economic development function that normally falls to the governor.

The feud between the governor and the Legiteers has been bitter over the years, but they rarely interact. Political decorum reigns in the halls of the Statehouse. The fights between South Carolina politicians are rarely carried out in face-to-face conflicts, but in news releases and speeches from the chamber floors and behind-the-scenes maneuvering.

The Legislature reconvenes Tuesday, and who is in charge has perhaps never been as important as it is now. The state must crawl out of a severe recession and faces stiff challenges: Unemployment stands among the nation's worst. Prisons bulge with inmates. Schoolchildren lag nationally in the ability to read and write. And the state must lure more business and industry to make up for massive job loss and find new sources of revenue to replace plummeting tax collections.

The battle for power

Since the beginning of his term as governor seven years ago, Sanford has tried to consolidate power in the executive branch, but he lost battle after battle with the Legislature. The governor has accused the Legiteers of outmaneuvering him. But McConnell and Harrell have said they stuck their necks out for the governor, only to watch Sanford destroy their trust.

"He had a wonderful message," McConnell said. But "he exploded his own opportunity. His word was just not reliable."

Sanford made enemies when he backed incumbents' election opponents even in his own party, disparaged the Legislature from his bully pulpit and used repeated vetoes to obstruct hard-won consensus in the House and Senate.

Every year, Sanford vetoes a stack of budget items and legislation, and every year for seven years the Legislature summarily dismissed almost every single one.

The governor can tick off a list of times he spoke out against a matter only to see the Legislature strip more power from the executive branch. Each time, the Legiteers asserted their authority over his:

— When he talked about selling off the state airplane and closing down the hanger to save money, Sanford said the Legislature moved it out of his Cabinet agency.

— When he suggested studying changes at Santee Cooper, his political appointments on the state-owned utility were taken away.

— When he weighed in on the development of the Jasper County port, the governor said, his influence on the State Ports Authority was removed.

Entering his last year in office, Sanford said he will pull back from nearly all of the things he wanted to change about South Carolina government and focus on what he thinks is the most important.

Sanford wants to give more power to future governors by getting rid of the Budget and Control Board, allowing the governor to appoint some constitutional officers who are now independently elected, such as the superintendent of education, and moving more agencies to the Cabinet.

Money vs. power

The critical battle for Sanford with Leatherman comes down to money and who controls it. His clash with Harrell and McConnell is about power and who exercises it.

The Legiteers stay united because they trust and respect each other. They say the other's word is dependable and that gives them the ability to build consensus and coalitions with other legislators to control the government. Conversely, they say those are the qualities that Sanford lacks.

Leatherman once characterized Sanford as "Chicken Little" for the governor's regular "the sky is falling" economic doomsday forecasts. He and Sanford have a monthly showdown at the Budget and Control Board, which controls much of the state's purse strings.

The governor and Leatherman don't argue, but the tension around the table is obvious. The votes on controversial items usually come down 3-2 with House Ways and Means Chairman Dan Cooper and Treasurer Converse Chellis voting with Leatherman. Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom typically votes on the losing side with Sanford.

Sanford wants to dissolve the Budget and Control Board and turn its power over to the executive branch with the creation of the Department of Administration.

The Budget and Control Board is what Sanford calls an "island of government" without a direct line of accountability. The agency controls much of the administrative functions in the state by legislative decree.

When the Legislature appointed Chellis, a former legislator, as treasurer in 2007 after Thomas Ravenel's fall from grace because of cocaine use, Sanford called the process a "banana republic." Chellis' appointment swung the power on the Budget and Control Board from Sanford back to Leatherman.

Leatherman said he is convinced that Sanford wants to downsize government to the point that people's needs are no longer being met. He said showdowns with Sanford are just his way of stopping the governor from taking the state down the wrong road.

The seeds of Sanford's political demise were sowed in part by a clash over a competitive grants fund administered by the Budget and Control Board.

In a big surplus year, the Legislature created a competitive grants fund to make cash available for local economic development efforts.

Sanford called the program a legislative slush fund that sent tax dollars back to the legislators' districts to pay for things such as an Elvis impersonator for a festival in Ridgeville in 2007.

Bad blood between Sanford and Sen. Jake Knotts, a retired 30-year law enforcement veteran and a Republican, began to boil when Knotts tried to make the governor out to be a hypocrite.

Knotts publicized the fact that Sanford received a competitive grant to put on the National Governors Association meeting in Charleston in 2006. And in a series of tit-for-tat dustups, Sanford backed Knotts' GOP opponent in the hard-fought 2008 election primary that nearly cost Knotts his Senate seat.

Knotts got even this summer when he tipped off the media that Sanford dropped his security detail and was missing in action.

Two days later, a reporter stopped the governor in the Atlanta airport on his way home from Argentina. A few hours later, in the afternoon of June 24, the governor revealed that he had been with his mistress.

Falling star

Just how the battle for power would play out was still in question before Sanford confessed his affair.

Despite his difficulties with the Legislature, Sanford had managed to use the recession to place himself on the national stage as a rising GOP star. There was talk of him as a possible Republican presidential candidate.

To the delight of conservative Republicans, he used the recession to preach about the evils of big government and he railed against the federal government's multibillion-dollar stimulus program.

Suddenly, Sanford's earlier economic doomsday prophecies seemed to be coming true. Had it not been for his sex scandal Sanford might have been able to leverage the budgetary problems into power concessions from the Legiteers. McConnell acknowledges that Sanford might have been able to capitalize on that opportunity, despite the damage already done to his relationship with legislators.

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Despite the disagreements, one thing the GOP-controlled Legislature and the Republican governor have in common is their desire to cut taxes. They just don't agree on what taxes to cut.

The Legislature in the last four years cut the grocery tax, lowered income taxes, eliminated some school district property taxes on owner- occupied homes and made the state more reliant on the volatile sales tax.

Sanford argued for a different mix of tax cuts and lectured the Legislature on what he saw as excess spending when times were good.

That series of tax breaks coupled with the recession created a perfect storm that pummeled the state budget and triggered the massive cuts in government services.

The state cuts would have been far more severe if not for the temporary infusion of $700 million over two years from the federal government through the stimulus package. Sanford opposed taking that money, and took his power struggle with the General Assembly to an all-time high when he took the legislators to court in May over the stimulus package.

The Legiteers fought back by enlisting other legislators to spread a message across the state: South Carolina would have to pay the federal money back whether the state accepted it or not. And without the money, Leatherman said the state would face financial "Armageddon."

Ultimately, the high court ruled against the governor.

With his loss on the stimulus fight and the revelation of his affair, Sanford's political life collapsed just as he had become one of the Republican Party's brightest rising stars.

At the same time, he may have firmly solidified the legislative control of state government that he had tried so long to loosen.

"When I stepped in, I didn't fully expect some of the limitations," Sanford said. "We were rather robust in the Christmas list of the things we wanted to change, and in some ways, to use a military term, it was a bridge too far and I didn't have the political fire power to support sustaining the political battle ... on any one of those changes."