In today’s Roanoke Times, columnist Ed Lynch (ex-chair of the Roanoke County Republican Party) writes about Sen. Creigh Deeds.
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| Sen. Creigh Deeds |
Creigh represents a swath of Virginia running from Charlottesville west to Alleghany County, as he has since Sen. Emily Couric died; prior to that, he was a member of the House of Delegates for a decade. He’s now running for Attorney General. He has, as columnist Ed Lynch points out, a long record. That should provide lots of fodder for Lynch to criticize, right?
Well, so you’d think. Mystifyingly, immediately after pointing out how long and “unfailingly liberal” that Creigh’s record is, Lynch wastes the rest of his column recounting Creigh’s work in the most recent General Assembly session, without a mention of his long voting record.
For those not from these parts, this past General Assembly session was a hell of an event. It dragged on well past the planned eight weeks, and the whole of the time was spent on the matter of the budget — very little else got done, because the budget was particularly important this year. As Lynch’s own paper editorialized a few months before the session, the 2003 session had cut expenses to the bone, and it was finally time to raise taxes back to where they were at before our previous governor, Jim Gilmore (R), slashed them without regard for balancing the budget. The Republican-led House and Senate ultimately voted to raise taxes to the level necessary to fund our obligations, to the fury of Grover Norquist and his ilk, and there is now a deep fissure running through the state party: on one half, the Republicans who believe that taxes should meet expenses; on the other half, a bunch of would-be libertarian spend-but-don’t-tax fruitcakes. I assume Lynch is in the latter category, as he writes:
Like Edwards, Deeds was part of [Democrat] Gov. Mark Warner’s raid on the collective purse this past spring. Like [Sen. John] Edwards, he voted for the largest tax increase in Virginia history only because there was not an even larger tax increase still on the table. Deeds supported the Senate’s $3.4 billion family budget killer, and supported it as long as it was a viable option.
Lynch would like to portray the attempt to meet our fiscal obligations as another instance of crazy Democrats raising taxes just for the fun of it, and conveniently fails to mention things like the Virginia Chamber of Commerce’s endorsement of the planned tax increase. What’s his evidence of Creigh’s tax-lovin’ ways?
SB 14, for example, permits the town of Iron Gate “to impose the local consumer utility tax on mobile phones by adopting a local ordinance on or after July 1, 2004.” SB 374 would have allowed Nelson County “to levy admissions tax on all classes of events, thereby removing existing limitations.”
Virginia, as a Dillon’s Rule state, requires localities to say “mother, may I?” before doing just about anything. So the town of Iron Gate and Nelson County asked the state for permission to levy taxes as they see necessary, and so Creigh submitted a bill on their behalf that would allow them to levy those taxes, should each municipality’s legislative process approve it. That’s the evidence that Creigh taxes like a madman — he provides localities with the independence that they deserve?
Apparently believing that it bolsters his case, Ed Lynch goes on:
Besides his work on taxes, Deeds also introduced a constitutional amendment this past session. SJ3 would have taken the job of drawing congressional and General Assembly district lines out of the hands of elected officials and given this crucial constitutional task to unelected bureaucrats.
And this is bad? After the Colorado and Texas redistricting fiascos, I should like to hope that we can all agree now that it’s time to take redistricting out of the hands of the legislature and put it into the hands of disinterested parties able to lay things out fairly. Give it until 2011, when Democrats are in control and redistricting next takes place, and I guarantee you that Ed Lynch will be whining over how unfair it is that Democrats are able to redistrict so unfairly, and why can’t it all be put into the hands of an impartial group?
Most puzzling about the whole piece is that Lynch can’t seem to settle on his thesis: is Creigh Deeds a powerful man who we should hold personally responsible for the tax increase, or is he, as Lynch repeatedly suggests, an ineffectively legislator who can’t get the tiniest of bills out of committee? The author wants to have it both ways, and that just can’t be.
I was worried when I saw this column, because I support Creigh Deeds for the nomination for Attorney General, and I think that he can defeat Del. Bob McDonnell, the presumed Republican nominee for the office. What sort of dirt do the Republicans have on Creigh?, I wondered. He’s irritatingly centrist to a liberal Democrat like me — maybe that’s Lynch’s criticism? No. Lynch is trying to paint Creigh as an extremist liberal with a record of failure. That dog don’t hunt, and Lynch knows it, which is why he only wrote about the previous session.
If this is the best criticism that the Republicans can muster, Creigh’s got that seat as good as locked up for November of ’05.