After Being Charged With 37 Ethics Violations, Gov. Sanford Faces House Impeachment Hearings

November 24, 2009 7:31 a.m. EST

Columbia, SC (AHN) - The South Carolina House of Representatives will begin considering an impeachment measure against Gov. Mark Sanford on Tuesday, a day after the state Ethics Commission said the Republican had committed 37 ethics violations.

The state House Judiciary Committee begins consideration of an impeachment resolution against Sanford ahead of the opening of the Legislature's session next year.

The Ethics Commission on Monday released the initial findings of its inquiry that began in August. It said the governor had violated ethics laws 37 times, most of them by using business class tickets for official trips, and using state aircraft for unofficial trips.

Several charges also detail Sanford's alleged use of campaign funds for personal gain, including one count for a $40 reimbursement that had no receipts, another count for a $96.95 reimbursement for "direct marketing services and a ticket to attend the 2009 presidential inauguration" in Washington.

"The House Republican Leadership has said since the beginning of this process that the House needed concrete findings from an official source before we could seriously deliberate the Governor's actions," state House Majority Leader Kenny Bingham said in a statement. "Now that the report has been released, I have no doubt that every member of the Caucus will carefully consider the severity of what the Commission has found."

But state Democratic Party Chair Carol Fowler was more critical, saying the findings would continue to "embarrass" the state.

"Now the General Assembly will have to take up these charges. They will spend weeks and weeks dealing with Sanford instead of attempting to solve the state's very serious economic and other problems," Fowler said.

The 49-year-old Sanford has been facing calls to resign and potential impeachment since June, when he disappeared for five days and then admitted that he had not, as his aides had said, been hiking on the Appalachian Trail but had been to Buenos Aires to meet a woman with whom he had been having an extramarital affair for over a year.

The state GOP early July voted to censure him instead of asking him to step down. Sanford's wife moved out of the Governor's Mansion the next month.

Chairman of the Republican Governors Association and a potential contender for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination before his admission of infidelity, Sanford has repeatedly admitted guilt about his controversial weekend trip, which had prompted concerns of gubernatorial succession, but has attributed the ensuing allegations about his use of the state plane and business class tickets as "pure politics."

The governor said in an open letter to constituents in August that the investigation by a budget committee led by state Sen. David Thomas into his use of business class tickets for economic development trips "has been standard practice at the Department of Commerce for the last 20-plus years."

"It's also something that's been done with Republican and Democratic governors alike, Secretaries of Commerce and their staff - and even members of the General Assembly," the governor had said. "Furthermore, the Legislative Audit Council (LAC), the legislative body's oversight arm, conducted an audit of the Department of Commerce in 2002 and 2004 - and though there were many business class tickets purchased during this time, the LAC's analysis said that "we did not find material noncompliance with state travel regulations."

Around the same time, Sanford said in an op-ed in the local newspaper the State that he had traveled on the state plane a total 228.95 hours, less than predecessors Carroll Campbell's 451 hours and David Beaseley's 303 hours.

"Of the 228.95 hours I flew, roughly 70 were in the Department of Natural Resources' single-engine Cessna," he said, "because whenever I had a chance I tried to use this small plane that has an operating cost about one-fifth that of the King Air; this alone saved taxpayers more than $60,000. No governor has done this before."