ShareVa. Senate's partisan rancor threatens '12 budget
Bob LewisSharp ideological clashes, petty resentments and ongoing legislative struggles over partisan power have thrown timely Senate adoption of a new state budget into question.
Democrats organize as the Senate minority even though they hold 20 seats, just as the Republicans do. But the GOP today lacks the votes necessary to pass a budget in the 40-member Senate by Feb 23, Senate Democratic Leader Richard L. Saslaw warned on Thursday.
"Right now, there's probably not 21 votes," Saslaw, D-Fairfax, said during a Democratic news conference held at the midpoint of the 60-day legislative session.
"There's a way to get there, but I'm just telling you that today, ... there's not 21 votes," Saslaw said, surrounded by fellow House and Senate Democrats.
"They're focused on extreme legislation that denigrates minorities, makes families less safe and divides Virginians," said Sen. Mark Herring, D-Loudoun.
He and other Democrats accused the Republicans of ramming "mean-spirited" right-wing social legislation through the legislature, needlessly bruising many egos on the way.
The Republican bills, they said, impose new voter identification requirements that would make it more burdensome to cast ballots than to buy guns. They would force women to undergo invasive ultrasound fetal scans before having abortions and deny welfare benefits to those who refuse or fail testing for illegal drugs.
Senate Republican Leader Thomas K. Norment called the Democratic claims and the prospect of holding the state's $80 billion, two-year spending blueprint hostage would be self-destructive for the Democrats.
"I attribute a lot of what's being said to political demagoguery right now," Norment said. "I am mindful about bruised feelings from the campaign, political egos that have been stepped on just from the natural transition from the Democrats controlling the process."
"It does challenge me intellectually for anyone in the Senate to say here on Feb. 9 ... that we're not going to vote for a budget that hasn't even been constructed yet," said Norment, from James City County.
Tempers have often been short and spite plentiful in the Senate since Jan. 11, the day the Republicans used a bitterly disputed tie-breaking vote by a non-senator, Republican Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, to seize power in an evenly divided Senate. That allowed the GOP to stack Senate committees with conservative who could advance their own bills and derail those of Democrats.
That unleashed rush of conservative bills that had perennially died in those same Senate committees under Democratic control for the past four years and under the rule of Republican moderates for years before that.
Now with Republican social conservatives in charge of both the legislature and the governor's office for the first time, bills such as the repeal of a 20-year-old law limiting individual gun purchases to one monthly are destined for passage.
Gov. Bob McDonnell rejected the Democrats claim that the GOP is indulging its obsession with conservative social issues.
"I think it's absolutely false to say that there's been an overreach and an undue focus on social issues. I think that's a creation of the Democrats and partly the creation of the media," McDonnell said. "About 3 percent of the bills that have come out of the House have been on social issues. Ninety seven percent have been on the things I've been talking about: jobs, transportation, higher education, energy, public safety, retirement system reform, government reform. That's what I'm talking about."
He also dismissed concerns that festering rancor in the Senate would leave Democrats and Republicans unable to agree on a Senate version of the budget McDonnell authored.
"I've talked to many, many Democrats and many, many Republicans in groups (and) one-on-one, and I think people generally think that in the committees, in the subcommittees, bills get voted up and down on the merits," McDonnell told a crowd of reporters Thursday morning.
The governor spoke minutes after Democratic Sen. L. Louise Lucas, angered by an acerbic debate in the Senate Education and Health Committee over legislation that would have changed the way public school teachers receive their contracts, threw her proxy votes at the committee's Republican chairman, Sen. Steve Martin, and stormed out of the meeting.