The Post‘s Gordon C. Morse (of whom I’m becoming a big fan) has a great article today about the state of the Republican-led Virginia House of Delegates. It’s painfully honest, referring to the House’s “institutional wretchedness” and Speaker Bill Howell’s (R-Stafford) state as a man “not drowning, but condemned,” who…oh, heck, I’ll just give you the whole paragraph:
Speaker William J. Howell (R-Stafford), a man described by a close-in observer last week as “not drowning, but condemned,” treads with little cat feet as he presides over a majority composed of circles within circles, some angry, some ideological, some befuddled. One wrong step, and it’s a fast escort to the plank.
Frankly, this article is so good I just want to reproduce the whole thing. Let’s see if I can stay within the Fair Use clause.
Morse compares the big talk from free-lunch Republicans who talk about small government and then vote to spend more:
Sternly reproached were the 17 Republican apostates who deserted the House majority in the 2004 session to join Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) and the more pragmatic state Senate in a budget compromise that included new taxes.
Surely, then, the House Republicans who opposed that compromise would remain steadfast to the principles at stake?
Not exactly. This session’s spending tally — meaning the individual requests for expenditures above and beyond those the governor proposed — finds that of 45 House members who opposed Warner’s compromise, 33 (including one Democrat) filed spending amendments totaling $2.85 billion.
That figure is nearly double the amount of public money that these fiscal conservatives insisted Virginia did not need last year.
A majority of Republicans in the House now vote against any revenue increase, but will happily vote for any spending increase, without any regard for the need to take in at least as much as is being spent. They know full well that the math doesn’t work, but they count on their constituents being lazy. This way, they can campaign on their refusal to raise taxes, and take credit for the spending. There’s always been a few bad apples like this in every legislature. Virginia is just special, I guess, because these are the guys who run the show here now, with Jim Gilmore and Jerry Kilgore being the king of the free-lunchers.
This, of course, is how Gilmore’s car tax debacle happened. As everybody knows, it took a Democrat, Gov. Mark Warner, to have the fiscal responsibility to fix the problem, with the help of fiscal conservatives of all political stripes in the Senate and the House.
The radical Republican vision of Virginia offered by free-lunchers is wholly unsustainable. As a financial entity, Virginia would collapse within a few years. We know that this is becoming increasingly obvious to Republicans throughout the state, what with Mark Warner’s 2001 victory, Paula Miller’s December victory, and the whole business community’s realization that Democrats are the party of business.
Day by day, week by week, month by month, the hubris and incompetence of Virginia Republican Delegates grows, and with it the inevitability of a shift to Democratic control, returning to our rightful 100-year role as the state’s dominating party.