The Virginia General Assembly is now past the halfway mark of its first session under Democratic control since the 2021 session, and I have to admit that I expected a little more out of my state’s legislature now that Republicans can’t quietly sink decent bills in committees as they did in the House of Delegates in the previous two-year session.
It’s not that the Western Hemisphere’s oldest continuous law-making body–I can’t write that without noting that for the first time in its 405-year history, the House is led by a Black man, Speaker Don Scott (D.-Portsmouth)–has been spinning its wheels in this session. As of Tuesday’s “crossover day,” the deadline for each chamber to pass any non-budget bill that the other may consider, more than a thousand bills have survived that deadline in our state’s unusually short legislative session.
They include a raft of gun-control measures, some of which attracted Republican votes and may escape a veto from Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), as well as various bills to protect Virginians from the enforcement of abortion bans (you can also think of them as forced-birth laws) in other states.
Other accomplishments by either house, in some cases by both, haven’t landed in as many headlines but deserve some recognition: streamlining rural broadband buildout, ending legacy admissions to public colleges and universities, banning unadvertised junk fees, extending health care to undocumented immigrant children, and legalizing the customary cyclist practice of treating stop signs without crossing traffic as yield signs.
I also appreciate how the General Assembly hasn’t rubber-stamped Youngkin’s ploy to help the Washington Capitals and Wizards move to Alexandria’s Potomac Yards neighborhood. That arena belongs in downtown D.C. on top of multiple Metro lines.
And yet the General Assembly has still missed major opportunities–even setting aside Dems postponing votes for constitutional amendments to end felony disenfranchisement and protect same-sex marriage and abortion rights until next year’s session.
(Constituional amendments must pass in separate General Assembly sessions before going to a popular vote, so I can understand how timing them for the same year as legislative elections makes them more obvious campaign issues.)
In particular, it’s disgraceful how often Democrats have quietly sunk decent bills in committees that would have put some limits on the ability of people and even companies to throw money at politicians. Virginia’s lax campaign-finance laws amount to legalized bribery of candidates and elected officials, and Dems in Richmond should be embarrassed to have done so little to fix that. Again.
On a lesser and more local level, I’m also annoyed that a measure to allow municipalities to ban noisy and polluting gas-powered leaf blowers got punted to next year’s session. Related: It’s still dumb how often cities and counties have to get a permission slip from Richmond to do things that would have little to no effect on their neighbors.
And then there are the cases where legislators didn’t even introduce bills that should have had a chance of passing. For example, four years after we couldn’t finish an anti-SLAPP bill to close Virginia to libel tourists, nobody tried to introduce one this year. And a year after a bill to restore direct online filing of state taxes got quashed in a House committee, nobody tried to fix that either.
I’ll be thinking about that last failure when I once again file our state taxes on paper. And when I vote this fall–as I will and as I always do, because I’ve already seen how much my state has changed, one election at a time. And because however grumpy I might get about one season’s legislative results, I’m not going to practice childlike citizenship by holding my voting breath until other people do the work.
https://robpegoraro.com/2024/02/16/progress-in-virginia-still-demands-some-patience/
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