Amid gov't shutdown, Sanford shares farewell address he planned to give

CHARLESTON, SC (WCSC) - Outgoing South Carolina first district congressman Mark Sanford says he had set aside 30 minutes on the floor of the House of Representatives last week to deliver his farewell address.

Instead, congress was busy trying to avoid a government shutdown which eventually took effect and Sanford wasn’t able to give it. He decided to share the text of the speech on his Facebook page Wednesday morning.

Sanford knew his last day in office would come since last June when he lost the Republican primary to Katie Arrington, who eventually went on to lose in the general election to Democrat Joe Cunningham.

Arrington would later blame Sanford in part for her loss because he never endorsed her. He also offered his own reasoning as to why the first district turned blue for the first time in more than 40 years.

Sanford’s time in office isn’t completely over yet, even though he has cleaned out his office in Washington and moved into a small space in the basement of the Rayburn Office building.

He was first elected to the first district seat in 1994 and held it until 2001. He was then elected governor in 2003 and weathered the publicity from admitting to an extramarital affair with an Argentine woman in 2009. He left the governorship in 2011 and was re-elected in the first district in 2013.

In his farewell address which he posted to his Facebook page, he walks down memory lane thanking friends and others involved in his political life since the beginning. He also thanks God, and references his ex-wife Jenny when speaking about his sons and the changes they went through when he became governor.

Finally, he alludes to the issues he sees with the way President Trump is governing the country, saying, “As a country, we have to get back to math that works.....We can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater with regard to institutions and traditions that have served our country well for more than 200 years.”

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