Veto-Palooza

GOVERNOR’S VETO PEN MAY BE CORKED, PEOPLE

FITSNews – June 27, 2007 – If budget vetoes were home runs, S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford would be in the Hall of Fame. Unfortunately, they’re not. Which means he’ll probably have to settle for the honor of “world’s least effective governor.” With a record-setting 243 budget vetoes totalling $167 million this year, Sanford went veto crazy. So crazy, in fact, he should probably submit his veto pen to Major League Baseball just to show us it isn’t corked.

Seriously, we knew the governor was going to swing for the fences with his budget vetoes this year, but this is ridiculous. There are legislators who can’t even count to 243, people.

We actually liked Sanford’s approach last year of vetoing the whole bloated mess and washing his hands of it. The fact is, if our state legislature approved it, there’s a good chance it’s crap we don’t need. Why go to all the trouble just to get to a specific dollar amount that the First Lady says is acceptable? We’ll always appreciate people cutting government, but by rejecting the House’s deal to sustain a manageable number of vetoes, the governor is sacrificing $40 million in taxpayer savings that he could have achieved just to be able to brag about wanting to save $167 million. It’s a $7.5 billion budget, governor. Get the scraps from the table you can or just veto the whole damn thing. Your wife will get over it.