Before a crushing primary defeat Tuesday night, Rep. Mark Sanford was already an endangered species: part of that rare breed of fiscal conservatives who opposes growing government even when Republicans are in charge.
When the 1994 “Republican revolution” started to lose steam as the decade wore on, the South Carolina lawmaker continued to push for spending cuts alongside a small group of conservative dissidents. Within five years, he and then-Rep. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., were shutting down a floor debate on an overstuffed appropriations bill in defiance of GOP leadership.
After ending his first stint in Congress due to self-imposed term limits, Sanford was elected governor, where he promptly clashed with fellow Republicans in the state legislature.
Sanford resisted state budgets that grew faster than inflation plus population growth. In 2004 alone, he issued 100 budget vetoes. He posed with pigs to protest pork barrel spending.
While other Republicans talked a good game about opposing President Barack Obama’s $831 billion, he was among the GOP governors who actually turned down the cash when it was offered to his state.
That consistent fiscal conservatism was briefly overshadowed by an extramarital affair and ill-fated visit to his mistress that was inaccurately described as a hike along the Appalachian trail. But Sanford’s careful stewardship of tax dollars also laid the groundwork for his political comeback.
“I absolutely failed in my personal life and my marriage but one place I never did fail was with the taxpayers,” Sanford said.
Returning to Capitol Hill, Sanford voted against bloated Republican farm bills. He was among just 94 House members to vote against trading away the sequestration budget cuts that were the GOP’s only real spending victory under Obama.
Under both Presidents Obama and Trump, Sanford opposed indefinite detention; unregulated NSA surveillance; bombing Syria without congressional approval; leaving intact the basic architecture of Obamacare; and ballooning the national debt.
Cheered as a Tea Party hero when he did these things on Obama’s watch, he became a RINO when he persisted under Trump.
Sanford picked a fight with one Republican too many. Like Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., he waxed philosophical about the president’s flaws. And as Flake found, Trump didn’t appreciate it.
State Rep. Katie Arrington, Sanford’s primary opponent, pilloried him as an obstreperous Never Trumper. When the president weighed in with an anti-Sanford tweet endorsing her candidacy just hours before the polls closed, she amplified it with tens of thousands of robocalls.
Voters in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District got the message. Sanford was gone.
Both Sanford and Trump were often cited as examples of Republicans abandoning their Bill Clinton-era concern about character. Sanford was at least introspective about his flaws in a way seldom seen from the party’s current titular head.
A Freedom Caucus ally, Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., rose to Sanford’s defense.
“He’s one of the most principled, consistent, and conservative members of Congress I’ve ever known,” Amash tweeted back at the president. “And unlike you, Mark has shown humility in his role and a desire to be a better man than he was the day before.”
Several years ago, this writer put in an interview request for a story about a controversy that did not directly involve Sanford, but rather someone the former governor-turned-congressman knew. His office told me he would not be available to comment.
Within an hour, I received a call from Sanford. He overrode his staff. He defended the individual in question on the record and began to quote a sermon he had heard.
“Does the worst thing you have ever done define you, or does it refine you?” Sanford asked, citing a pastor. I could tell he was wrestling with that question himself.
Even when criticizing Trump, Sanford would sometimes allow that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
Sanford was twice elected to Congress in a political environment where a protest against a Democratic president was supposed to lead to a more principled fight against big government.
Now it’s those principles that have taken a holiday along the Appalachian trail.
