One year ago on this date, CSGOPOTD
first profiled the U.S. House Representative from South Carolina’s 1st District, Mark Sanford, a man who once was considered a possible future president, but whose career came crashing to a halt after he went “hiking the Appalachian Trail”. And by that, we mean that he said he was hiking when he actually was taking personal trips to see his Argentinian mistress. This led to Sanford leaving office in disgrace, and of course, an ugly divorce from his wife with a settlement agreement that Sanford has repeatedly been accused of violating, including letting himself over to their place to watch the Super Bowl without her knowledge. In typical hypocritical GOP fashion, the adulterer Sanford also was a self-professed champion of “the sanctity of marriage” who wanted to protect the institution from all those gay folks who might threaten it. He returned to the Congressional seat he vacated while serving as Governor by winning a public debate he held between himself and a cardboard cutout of Nancy Pelosi (really), and then made the classy move of breaking up with the mistress who he nearly ruined his career for over Facebook while she was in Paris.
Rep. Sanford won re-election in 2014 when he ran unopposed, but perhaps a sign that he doesn’t have a good hold on the seat is that 8,423 people in his District bothered to use the “Write-In” option rather than cast their vote for him. His more recent history:
-July 10th, 2014: Rep. Sanford votes for House Amendment 1040, to prevent the implementation of the dreaded United Nations Agenda 21 Treaty, that in spite of just being recommended climate change guidelines, have many conspiracy theorists within the extreme right convinced it’s a plot for global domination.
-September 15th, 2014: Mark Sanford agrees to go to mediation with his wife in their divorce settlement, where she cites he must undergo a psychiatric exam, and attend both parenting classes and anger management classes.
-December 16th, 2014: Sanford is under hard scrutiny for controversial six-figure payouts from Tree.com, a company that regulators say deceived their customers, and Sanford was one of their directors who owned stock for while campaigning to get back into Congress.
-January 22nd, 2015: an anti-abortion bill, HR 7, was moving through the House, and was halted because even some members of the GOP were put off by the language in the bill regarding its definition of rape. Mark Sanford, however, had no problem with that, and voted for it anyway.
-February 3rd, 2015: Rep. Sanford co-sponsors and votes for the latest Republican attempt at repealing the Affordable Care Act. This in spite of the fact that the law is not just working, but better than experts predicted.
-March 3rd, 2015: Sanford votes against funding the Department of Homeland Security as part of a Republican protest of President Obama’s executive orders on immigration.
-May 13th, 2015: Mark Sanford voted for HR 36, a ban on abortion at 20 weeks, which he also co-sponsored.
-September 11th, 2015: Sanford votes against the United States' nuclear treaty with Iran.
-September 18th, 2015: Rep. Sanford votes with most House Republicans to defund Planned Parenthood, based on highly edited “sting” videos submitted by a Pro-Life advocacy group that have been repeatedly debunked by investigators.
As of right now, no Democrat has registered to challenge Mark Sanford for his seat in 2016. Considering how close Elizabeth Colbert-Busch was in 2013, in the special election for the seat, if she were to jump back into the race this year, she might be able to clear the hurdle. If his divorce records from five years ago ever get unsealed, it could only add to the amount of embarrassing details of Sanford’s private life hindering his political career and make this a potential swing for Democrats. Jenny Sanford was decidedly a woman scorned, and what little information that has been made public shows that where there's smoke, there could be fire.
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