South Carolina Rep. Mark Sanford is once again in the news for the wrong reasons.
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That the Republican whose governorship was wrecked by an extramarital affair is still having problems with his family and has broken his engagement (apparently to his fiancée’s surprise) is disappointing.
Some of the allegations being made in what continues to be an ugly custody battle are, if true, worse than disappointing.
I don’t know the truth about the Sanfords’ private wounds. But I am familiar with the public record.
Since returning to Congress, Mark Sanford has had a love affair with the Constitution.
Sanford has quietly emerged as one of the most reliable liberty Republicans in Congress, alongside Justin Amash and Thomas Massie.
Shunned by the establishment in his first campaign, Sanford doesn’t owe the Republican leadership or the Washington power brokers any favors.
About the only people who took any political risks to help Sanford when he was trying to win his House seat were Ron and Rand Paul.
The end result is that Sanford is if anything even more independent than he was during his first stint in Congress.
That’s no small feat. Back then, he voted against the Violence Against Women Act on constitutional grounds even though it would obviously invite charges of being soft on domestic violence.
Sanford was among a handful of congressmen who declined to vote for the 1998 law, signed by President Bill Clinton, that made regime change in Iraq the official policy of the U.S. government—and arguably foreshadowed the war that would take place less than a decade later.
“I don’t believe in preemptive war,” Sanford later told The American Conservative. “For us to hold the moral high ground in the world, our default position must be defensive.”
Despite the small-government rhetoric of the “Republican revolution,” members of Newt Gingrich’s leadership team looked quizzically at this strict fiscal conservative.
“I remember the leadership would come and say, ‘This stuff is okay during the campaign, but we have to govern,’ and I thought it was govern toward a specific end, not just govern to govern,” Sanford subsequently recalled.
Old habits die hard. Now back on Capitol Hill, Sanford has continued opposing wars that aren’t in our national interest, a streak that dates back to Kosovo during the Clinton era.
On key foreign-policy votes, he sometimes joins Amash, Massie and Walter Jones as the only Republicans to defy leadership and err on the side of peace.
The South Carolina congressman has been a leading proponent of NSA reform, reining in surveillance practices that are difficult to comport with the Bill of Rights. He also resisted efforts to water down legislation aimed at doing just that.
Sanford filed a bipartisan amicus brief in support of the ACLU’s request to publish some FISA court opinions, so the American people can better understand what surveillance laws they are actually living under.
“It is important to better understand how Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act is being implemented and where there is room for improvement,” he said in a statement. “Requiring the FISA courts to make their opinions public could prove an important step toward better protecting America from terrorism without compromising the constitutional rights of its citizens.”
Sanford has also co-sponsored legislation requiring the publication of major FISA court decisions.
Moving from defending the Fourth Amendment to the Sixth Amendment, Sanford has voted to end the indefinite detention of American citizens allowed under the National Defense Authorization Act.
He has done all of these things while remaining one of the most uncompromising fiscal conservatives in Washington.
Not everyone knows that Sanford is a libertarian-leaning Republican. He is once again being mocked as a hypocritical “family values” crusader.
Yes, Sanford is both a pro-life Christian and a sinner. But he wears his faith on his sleeve far less than his critics—many of whom just see that he’s a Republican from South Carolina and start making assumptions—suppose.
When it comes to the size and role of government, Sanford is a different kind of Republican than Mike Huckabee.
And while Sanford seems obtuse about the pain he causes others as absentmindedly follows his heart down the Appalachian trail, he is not in the same league as Scott DesJarlais, the “pro-life” Republican congressman who urged his ex-wife and mistress to have abortions.
Whatever other promises he has broken, Mark Sanford has been faithful to his oath to uphold the Constitution. That, unfortunately, puts him in the minority in Congress no matter which party is in control.