In another freewheeling performance in front of the cameras this afternoon, Mark Sanford accused state lawmakers of trying to railroad him out of office, and demanded that he be given a chance to present his “side of the story.”
“It is not OK to short-circuit an ethics process to try and get the result that you want,” said the beleaguered governor, referring to an ethics inquiry that’s focused on his decision to leave the state in the lurch when he visited his Argentinean mistress, and his use of state aircraft.
Yesterday, House Speaker Bobby Harrell became the latest Republican to call for Sanford to resign or face impeachment charges.
Sanford said that not allowing him to present his case would create a “kangaroo court…based on political opponents’ accusations.”
And he singled out Sen. Dave Thomas, a Republican who has led the anti-Sanford movement, suggesting that Thomas had improperly met with the director of the ethics committee about the inquiry.
He added: “I get that many members of the general assembly would like to see me gone.” But he said that his political antagonists had long wanted to get rid of him, and suggested they’d seized on his recent missteps as an excuse.
Sanford didn’t directly mention his romantic travails, but he did defend himself on the issue of his charging business class airplane seats to taxpayers, referring to “thirty years of history of people buying business class tickets, of both parties, and not once did people say, ‘you broke the law.’”
In other words: he’s not going anywhere just yet.