On 16 May 02012 with 27 comments
I can now say for sure which delegates were actually present at yesterday morning’s vote on Tracy Thorne-Begland’s nomination, and just pretending that they weren’t there.
Anna Scholl was kind enough to send me the House of Delegates’ vote tallies for judicial nominations on Monday night / Tuesday morning, towards the goal of identifying who sat on their hands and didn’t vote. Of the 26 people who did not vote, Del. Jennifer McClellan reports that Habeeb, Tyler, Joannou, Brink, Englin, Ransone, and Howell were all legitimately absent. So now to find out what’s up with the remaining nineteen. There are two sources of information that help us figure that out.
First, the vote tallies. The vote on Tracy was held at 1:12:56 AM. There was a vote held on another judicial nomination mere seconds earlier, at 1:12:33. And a vote held on another judicial nomination just seconds later, at 1:13:19. Here’s a table listing every delegate who did not vote on each of those three occasions:
Delegates Who Did Not Vote| 1:12:33 | 1:12:56 | 1:13:19 |
|---|
| Brink | Brink | Brink |
| Englin | Englin | Englin |
| Gilbert | |
| Habeeb | Habeeb | Habeeb |
| Head | |
| Howell | Howell | Howell |
| Joannou | Joannou | Joannou |
| Johnson | |
| Jones | Jones | Jones |
| May | |
| | McQuinn |
| Miller | |
| Minchew | |
| Morris | |
| O’Bannon | O’Bannon | O’Bannon |
| Orrock | Orrock | Orrock |
| Peace | Peace | Peace |
| Plum | Plum | Plum |
| Purkey | Purkey | Purkey |
| Ransone | Ransone | Ransone |
| Tata | Tata | Tata |
| Tyler | Tyler | Tyler |
| Ware, O. | Ware, O. | Ware, O. |
| Ware, R.L. | |
| Webert | Webert | Webert |
| Wright | Wright | Wright |
| Yancey | Yancey | Yancey |
One can immediately see who was present 23 seconds earlier, disappeared from the chambers (according to the official record), and then returned 23 seconds later: Todd Gilbert (R-Shenandoah), Christopher Head (R-Roanoke), Joe Johnson (D-Washington County), Joe May (R-Loudoun), Jackson Miller (R-Manassas), Randy Minchew (R-Leesburg), Richard Morris (R-Isle of Wight), and R. Lee Ware (R-Powhatan). These are our eight “Profiles in Courage” legislators—guys who failed this little test of basic human decency, who knew that they were doing something wrong, but didn’t want it on their permanent record.
Then there’s our second source of data, Andy Jenks’ coverage for NBC-12. Jenks is doing something standard for blogs, but extraordinary for news stations—he’s e-mailed every legislator who did not vote, asking what their excuse is, and updating his story as their answers come in. Everybody who the tally indicates was absent who responded to him confirmed that they were, indeed, absent. Minchew confirmed that he sat on his hands. But the award for the biggest load of horseshit has to go to Delegate Ware. Here is what Jenks has to say about Ware:
R. Lee Ware Jr., R-Powhatan: By e-mail, a staff member wrote, “Delegate Ware had to leave before the final votes–after 1:00 a.m.–so he would be in a semblance of mind for his teaching duties at 7:30 the same morning.”
This is a bald-faced lie. Let’s look at his votes around 1:12 AM:
1:11:45—yea
1:12:10—yea
1:12:33—yea
1:12:56—no vote
1:13:19—yea
1:13:40—yea
1:14:01—yea
Del. Ware just kept right on voting through the entire block. He voted in all of them. Either his staff member is misinformed, or Ware is already attempting to dodge his own record.
Let’s revisit our math. It would have taken 51 votes for Tracy to have been confirmed. He got 33. There were ten abstentions and eight guys sitting on their hands, pretending they weren’t in the chamber. That’s…51 votes. Ain’t that the damnedest coincidence?
On 16 May 02012 with 17 comments
Further to the 26 delegates who didn’t vote and the 10 delegates who abstained from voting for Tracy Thorne-Begland’s judicial nomination, I want to highlight Del. Jennifer McClellan’s comments explaining the distinction:
For the record, 4 delegates were not present at all on Monday due to “pressing personal business” (which is how excused absences are recorded in the House Journal): The Speaker, Bob Brink, David Englin, and Margaret Ransone. I know Brink and Englin would have voted yes, and would have been there if they could.
Several members had already left by the time of the vote (which was around 1:15 am). I don’t recall all of them, but I know Habeeb, Tyler, Joannou, had already left before we started considering judges.
The tradition/protocol in the General Assembly is not to vote No on a judge. If you can’t support them, you don’t vote. It is rare to vote No. It is even rarer to abstain. House Rule 69 says it all:
Rule 69. Upon a division of the House on any question, a member who is present and fails to vote shall on the demand of any member be counted on the negative of the question and when the yeas and nays are taken shall, in addition, be entered on the Journal as present and not voting. However, no member who has an immediate and personal interest in the result of the question shall either vote or be counted upon it.
Had the hour not been so late, someone might have had the presence of mind to demand that those in their seats and not voting be counted as voting no. But I think it is safe to say that was their intention.
I really wonder what “immediate and personal interest” in Tracy’s appointment the 10 members who abstained had. I am fairly certain none of them are related to him.
So of the 26 delegates who did not vote, we know that 7 (Habeeb, Tyler, Joannou, Brink, Englin, Ransone, and Howell) were not present. That leaves 19 unexplained. (C. Todd Gilbert (R-Shenandoah), Christopher T. Head (R-Roanoke), Joseph P. Johnson Jr. (D-Washington County), S. Chris Jones (R-Suffolk), Joe T. May (R-Loudoun), Jackson H. Miller (R-Manassas), J. Randall “Randy” Minchew (R-Leesburg), Richard L. Morris (R-Isle of Wight), John M. O’Bannon III (R-Henrico), Robert D. Orrock Sr. (R-Caroline), Christopher K. Peace (R-Hanover), Kenneth R. Plum (D-Fairfax), Harry R. Purkey (R-Virginia Beach), Robert Tata (R-Virginia Beach), Roslyn C. Tyler (D-Sussex), Onzlee Ware (D-Roanoke), R. Lee Ware Jr. (R-Powhatan), Michael J. Webert (R-Fauquier), Thomas C. Wright Jr. (R-Lunenburg), and David E. Yancey (R-Newport News).) Were they actually absent, or did they just sit on their hands when it came time to vote?
Just at a glance, I have to note the extraordinary coincidence that of these nineteen legislators, there are only three Democrats. No Democrats voted against Tracy. With a random distribution of absenteeism, we’d expect six Republicans to those three Democrats. Instead, we see Republicans overrepresented by 160%. The simplest explanation for this is that a bunch of these Republicans were sitting on their hands.
This isn’t just important in the abstract, but also because it goes to my assertion that those who failed to vote could have stopped the torpedoing of Tracy’s nomination, but failed to do so. As 51 votes are required for a nomination, he was actually 20 short, so the 10 abstentions wouldn’t have made the difference. Nineteen did not vote at all, but may have actually been there.
Did you see any of these nineteen on the video during the debate early yesterday morning? Let’s tally them up. Let’s find out who was absent, and who really knew that what they were doing was wrong, but didn’t want their position to show up on their voting record.
On 16 May 02012 with 26 comments
Monday night, my wife and I stayed up late to watch live video of the House debate the nomination of Tracy Thorne-Begland to a judgeship. My wife and Tracy went through the Sorensen Political Leaders Program together. We know Tracy, and we know him to be a stellar human being. Watching his nomination fall in a 33-31 vote purely because he’s gay was embarrassing. Yet again, Virginia will be the laughingstock of the nation.
There’s one aspect of the vote that I want to call attention to. There are the 33 delegates who voted for Tracy. Great. There are the 31 delegates who voted against him. So the hood is off—they’re bigots, but they’re willing to own up to being bigots. Decades ago, these same legislators would have voted to prohibit interracial marriage, for Jim Crow, for slavery, for secession. But then there are the ten abstentions. Delegates who were there, in the room, who chose to abstain rather than vote yes or no. Those are Anne B. Crockett-Stark (R-Wythe), Riley E. Ingram (R-Hopewell), R. Steven Landes (R-Augusta) Israel D. O’Quinn (R-Bristol), Lacey E. Putney (I-Bedford), Larry N. Rush (R-Montgomery) Edward T. Scott (R-Madison), Beverly J. Sherwood (R-Frederick), and Chris Stolle (R-Virginia Beach).
(There were also 26 delegates who didn’t vote, but the unusual hour of the vote and, indeed, the very unusual time of year for this reconvened session surely led to a high rate of absenteeism, so I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt until I can find out for sure who was present.)
These ten delegates should be a special kind of shamed. Two votes could have made the difference here, three certainly would have. All ten of these delegates witnessed an injustice, they knew it was wrong, and they did nothing. They could have stopped it. I’ll repeat that: They could have stopped it. But they didn’t. They chose not to. All of them would do well to consider the words of John J. Chapman’s 1900 commencement address to the graduating class of Hobart College, a speech so important to me that I’ve carried it in my wallet for well over a decade. This is the concluding paragraph:
I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. “In a few years,” reasons one of them, “I shall have gained a standing, and then I shall use my powers for good.” Next year comes and with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his horizon of thought, his ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don’t be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.
These ten legislators failed their trial. They failed Tracy Thorne-Begland. They failed Virginia.
On 10 May 02012 with 25 comments
A Washington Post reporter interviewed five prep-school classmates of Mitt Romney’s, all of whom independently recalled that, in Mitt Romney’s senior year, he attacked a gay classmate. They say Romney led a small posse to the kid’s dorm room, where he was held down while Romney forcibly cut the crying boy’s shaggy, bleached blond hair. Decades later, the victim recalled to a former classmate how terrifying and life-affecting that the incident was. There’s something about these white, conservative, male politicians who grew up in wealthy, powerful families in the 1950s and 1960s that led them to engage in what they probably regarded as pranks, but their victims recalled as terrible, traumatic experiences. →
On 9 May 02012 with 13 comments
In the March issue of their newsletter, a “Whitehouse [sic] Watchdog” column signed by newsletter editor Ponch McPhee concludes by declaring that “we shall not have any coarse [sic] but armed revolution should we fail with the power of the vote in November.” (It’s on page 7 of the PDF.) “Treason” is the word that we use for that, right? →
On 9 May 02012 with 1 comment
I thought that the USPS was in financial trouble because they’d over-promised pensions. Nope. It turns out that a law passed by Congress in 2006 requires the USPS to save up enough money to pay 100% of their pension obligations for the next 75 years by 2016. That’s unheard of. So why require that? To break the back of the USPS union. The same law prohibits the USPS from engaging in any business activity other than strictly postal services, so they can’t even innovate their way out of this. →
On 8 May 02012 with 1 comment
The Chicago Tribune is running a brilliant investigative series on how flame retardants came to be used in so many of the products that we buy. It turns out that a) they don’t actually stop fires even a little bit b) they cause serious health problems and c) tobacco companies created a fake public interest group to push for laws requiring these useless, expensive chemicals in order to avoid having to create cigarettes that wouldn’t light furniture on fire. →
On 6 May 02012 with no comments
Iron-56, the most common isotope of iron, is what all material in the universe “wants” to be. That is, the nuclei of matter is all gradually exhausting its energy, and iron-56 is the form of matter with the lowest energy per nucleon. Eventually, stars will turn into iron—huge balls of iron. Everything will be iron. The good news is that this won’t happen for 10^1500 years, a period of time so long that we can’t really grasp it. That’s a quingentillion years away. For comparison, there are probably no more than 10^81 atoms in the entire universe, so 10^1500 is just a mind-bogglingly long amount of time. The universe right now is just over 10^10 years old, so you can see that it’s really just a mewling infant at this point. →
On 4 May 02012 with no comments
After every law in the Code of Virginia is a little section called “history.” If you’ve seen it, you’ve almost certainly ignored it, because it looks like nonsense. In fact, it’s just a poorly encoded collection of really valuable data about that law. Here’s a translation guide. (From my State Decoded blog.) →
On 4 May 02012 with 6 comments
At 508 miles, Route 58 is the longest numbered road in Virginia. It stretches from Cumberland Gap to Virginia Beach, passing through Martinsville, Danville, Emporia, and Franklin along the way. When living in the New River Valley, I looked at taking it as a shortcut to the Outer Banks. That would have been a very long drive, indeed—460 is the way to go. It was built in 1931, using much of the 1918 State Routes 12 and 10. →
On 3 May 02012 with 2 comments
You’ll remember the story of the Lost Colony—Sir Walter Raleigh’s settlement in the late 1500s that just disappeared, leaving only the word “Croatoan” carved into the fort’s wall. (They’d arranged the signal of a Maltese cross to be carved into a tree to mean they’d been forcibly removed, and no such carving was found.) But they were not found on Croatoan Island, and nobody knows what ever happened to those 118 people. It occurred to a UNC professor that the pair of small patches pasted over portions of a map of the North Carolina coast—produced by members of the expedition—might be concealing useful information. Lo and behold, one of them was atop a marker indicating a fort, in a spot that is now a golf course. Next up: archaeology. →
On 2 May 02012 with 6 comments
At long, long last, the state is accepting lobbyist registrations and disclosures electronically. I gather that lobbyists must use this—they can’t keep filing on paper. Pssst, Virginia! Don’t make me FOIA these records, just let me download them! →
On 2 May 02012 with no comments
Pete Stark, a twenty (!) term Democrat from San Francisco, accused a San Francisco Chronicle reporter of contributing to one of his opponents. This took place while he was being videotaped, in the Chronicle’s offices. The reporter, who was in the room, said that wasn’t true. Then he said that he’d gotten the name wrong, and provided another name, the name of somebody who doesn’t work for the paper. This shortly after he accused his primary challenger of taking enormous bribes, another charge that he couldn’t prove, and wound up apologizing for. Watching the video, I think that a reasonable person would have to conclude that the 80-year-old Stark is experiencing the symptoms of dementia. His family and staff would do well to encourage him to retire from politics. →
On 1 May 02012 with 1 comment
Miami-Dade County, famously, has established laws that prohibit sex offenders from being within half a mile of a park, school, day care, or any place where children could hypothetically gather. In reality, that made it impossible for the city’s sex offenders to live anywhere at all, other than camping under the Julia Tuttle Causeway. (Until a few years ago, probation officers were instructing newly released prisoners to go live there.) It turned out there was another legal spot—a chunk of vacant, city-owned land—and a dozen sex offenders had started camping there, at the advice of probation officers, the men say. So the city established a “park” there—they plopped some rusty toys on the 100-by-40 foot parcel of land and declared it consequently off-limits to sex offenders. →
On 1 May 02012 with 2 comments
By way of reminder, The State Decoded is now my full-time job, courtesy of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and I’m writing there regularly about state codes and legal structures. (Only now do I notice that it’s been nearly a month since my last blog entry there. I’ve been working simultaneously on six blog entries for the site. I suspect I should do them serially, rather than in parallel.) State codes turn out to be awfully interesting, luckily for me, and I’m trying to share on the State Decoded blog some of the what makes them so engaging. I intend to start putting up a note here every time I post something there, but in the meantime, there are a couple of thousand words there that might be of interest.
On 18 April 02012 with 8 comments
Remember in 2009, when 5CD congressional candidate Feda Kidd Morton accused the State Board of Elections of committing election fraud to get Virgil Goode tossed out of office? Well, the SBE is teaching the former Fluvanna Republican Party chair a thing or two about election fraud: Morton has been arrested and charged with election fraud, Carlos Santos writes. She’s charged with making a false statement on an election form, a class 5 felony under § 24.2-1016. August 11 is listed as the date of the offense. According to The Hook‘s Lisa Provence, Morton certified that she’d witnessed people signing a petition that she had not actually witnessed. Next up is a preliminary hearing, in a month’s time.
Republicans are so desperate to prove that election fraud is a problem that they’re committing it themselves. Way to take one for the team, Feda!
On 13 April 02012 with 10 comments
Karl Rove’s nonprofit, Crossroads GPS, just got an anonymous $10M donation to fund attack ads against President Obama. This is the second $10M+ contributions that the organization has received anonymously. Is there anybody who thinks that we should have a political system that allows anonymous, unlimited political contributions? Anybody? →
On 13 April 02012 with 27 comments
One of these things is not like the others. One of these things is not the same. →
On 11 April 02012 with 6 comments
Some Japanese researchers did the math on the fate of the billions of tons of rocks and water that were tossed into space when Earth was hit by an asteroid 65M years ago. It turns out that much of that material probably bore life, and it wound up not just on the Moon, but also on on Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Some of the ejecta (about 1,000 rocks) would have even wound up on an Earth-like planet orbiting a red dwarf star, located 20 light years away. This math tells us that life would only have needed to evolve at 25 sites throughout the Milky Way for these sorts of spores from those planets to have seeded the entire galaxy with life. →
On 11 April 02012 with 2 comments
The NOAA reports that the temperatures wasn’t just record-breaking in March, but beat the prior record by a stunning 8.6°F above the average for the 20th century. In the history of U.S. weather record keeping, only one month has ever seen a larger departure from the historical average: January 2006. Every state—all fifty—had a record warm temperature in March, with 15,272 temperature records broken. In 21 cases, the nighttime high exceeded the prior record daytime high. →
