Why it took them that many hours to give a slight rap on the knuckles to the governor for abandoning the state I will never know, but then I’m not a Republican.
After nearly four hours of deliberation and multiple rounds of balloting, the South Carolina Republican Party voted Monday night to censure Mark Sanford for secretly traveling overseas to visit his mistress — but stopped short of calling on the governor to resign.
It took them 4 hours. Mr. Willis, you’ve obviously never tried to have a conference call with that many people. I guarantee they lost at least an half an hour of that conference call to people trying to dial in, someone being dropped, some numbnut trying to get on a conference call using a cell phone with a half-dead battery when they know that the call is going to last longer then they have on the charge.
However, it is nice to know you have a baseline for how long it should take a state political party to issue some sort of sanction to one of its members after they are caught doing something against the party’s beliefs. Whatever sanction the party approves it must be done in less than 4 hours of deliberation and voting. Otherwise they’re just taking too long.
Did they actually have any other options? Is the state GOP in SC a punitive body? Can they fine people or sentence them to jail? He hasn’t been shown to have broken any laws so probably can’t be impeached. They can’t force him to resign. So you’re criticizing that they didn’t send him a more harshly worded letter?
Do we have a timeline on:
Spitzer?
Blogovich?
Jefferson?
Conyers?
Dodd?
Clinton?
etc.
etc.
etc.
When any of those people just walks off on the job, we can talk. Not even the amazingly odious William Jefferson did so. I don’t care how tough it is to conference call (it isn’t), what Sanford did wrong was pretty easy for even you on the right to understand, and yet it took them hours.
I wonder how many people got defriended on facebook after this meeting?
“He hasn’t been shown to have broken any laws so probably can’t be impeached.”
Actually, adultery is illegal in South Carolina.
On a serious note, they could have at least called on him to resign. I don’t know if they could have forced him to, but they should at least called on him to resign.
He did abandon his job, after all.
Republican Mark Sanford abandoned his State, abandoned his wife, and abandoned his children.
Republicans abandoned their integrity and abandoned their ideals by giving Republican Mark Sanford a free pass.
Republican Rule # 1: Rules Are For Other People
It does indeed seem like a case of dereliction of duty, as far as official punishments go. Most of the other points regarding whether he should resign are debatable I think, but that one seems pretty clear-cut to me. I don’t know if the legislature has the ability to actually remove him from office, but if so, they should have.
To get back to the original question, the reason it took that long is because government is about politics, not about doing what’s right. That’s also why government sucks at pretty much everything it tries to do.
If a Democratic governor did this, all the usual dickheads on the right would be SCREAMING for his resignation. But if it’s a Republican, gosh, I guess it’s okee dokee because he has the love of Jesus in his heart.
I wonder how long Sanford thinks it will take for the people of S.C. to ‘try and fall back in love’ with him?
It does indeed seem like a case of dereliction of duty, as far as official punishments go.
So it’s okay for Spitzer to resign, and the governor of New Jersey who’s name escapes me, but not Sanford? Why is that?
Next time you go walkabout, Mark, at least leave a voicemail to the Lt. Gov., okay?
As I said Mr. Willis, you’ve obviously never had to coordinate a conference call with that many people on it. There were at least 22 people on that call (the number of people who voted to censure Sanford), assuming some of them dialed in from the same phone you’re still probably looking at at least 10 lines. You are going to lose time to people being late dialing-in. You’re going to lose time to people dropping off because they hit the disconnect button instead of the mute button. And since they were discussing a whole range of issues related to Sanford, there is going to be time lost to conversations derailed by other topics. I got it, you hate Republicans and all they stand for. Tracking on that. However it is still awful petty to snark about how it took them four whole HOURS to vote to officially censure him.
Which would matter if it was clear that he had actually committed the crime of adultery within South Carolina’s jurisdiction. The criminal statute has specific definitions for the crime, and they are more rigorous in defining adultery than any spouse or family court would be.
If they had it would have still be a wholly symbolic gesture as they lack the authority to force him out of office. However, if they had called on him to resign we’d have been greeted by Mr. Willis referring to the statement as a “firm slap on the wrist” instead of a “slight rap on the knuckles”, so there is that I suppose.
I know this will come as a shock to people, but I’d have to disagree. The legislative session had ended. There wasn’t a hurricane in the Atlantic bearing down on Myrtle Beach. Last time I checked Cuba wasn’t staging for an invasion. There are no major court cases being decided which could likely plunge Columbia into violent rioting. IIRC the weather was even going to be nice in the area so there probably weren’t going to be major floods. Maybe someone was worried that a Tea Party would wind up firing at Ft. Sumter? We all know how it turned out last time a bunch of people in SC who were unhappy with the government got together. What is the duty to which he was derelict? Is the governor of SC actually required to tell someone where he is going every where he goes? Is it required that his Blackberry is on 24-7 and that he responds to calls within so many minutes? If you’re going to try and say someone is derelict in their duties, you’d better know what their actual duties and responsbilities are first.
Spitzer was facing honest-to-God criminal charges and McGreevey (the NJ gov) had hired his lover for an important state position and then had a sexual harassment lawsuit brought against him by his lover which prompted his resignation. Personally, I think Spitzer should have hung on longer as, really, the criminal punishment for someone being busted for solicitation the first time is usually a fine and a couple days in prison. Of course, thanks to his resigning charges were dropped since it wasn’t in the public’s interest to prosecute him for it after he left office I guess. That worked out for him. Of course he was also, apparently, the only person in all of NY who seemed to want to do anything to watch what was happening on Wall Street. That didn’t work out for the rest of us.
That would have saved us from this long, national nightmare.
Spitzer was facing honest-to-God criminal charges and McGreevey (the NJ gov) had hired his lover for an important state position and then had a sexual harassment lawsuit brought against him by his lover which prompted his resignation.
Well, okay, then.
The puzzling INs AND OUTs of South Carolina politics! A man IN jail with an extensive background in crime was let OUT of jail and went on to be a serial killer! A Governor with poor judgement who shirked his duties and went missing OUT of the country to visit his mistress somehow mananged to remain IN as governor. When traveling IN South Carolina, I will look forward to getting OUT!
One shouldn’t be mean to a whole State, but it is a fact that the one time I drove home from DC, via I-10 because this was winter, and I-80 was not really availalble, I drove a across a little corner of South Carolina on the way to Atlanta, and I did not get out of the car in that time, so I can still say I’ve never set foot in the state that started the Civil War to defend slavery.
From my perspective, the issue is quite simple. Rightly or wrongly, he has lost a substantial number of people who are willing to support him, place confidence in him, and trust him. A leader needs as many people believing in him or her as possible.
As for resignation, http://www.tinyurl.com/n3vlg3