Republicans in Virginia push conservative agenda, with bills on guns, gays

RICHMOND — The Republican revolution is on in Richmond.

Virginia Republicans have aggressively pursued a conservative agenda since taking over all of state government, steamrolling Democrats along the way.

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 On the agenda: job creation, road improvements and raising academic standards.

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Va.’s part-time ‘decider’: With an evenly split Virginia Senate, Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling (R), whose position is only part-time in the state of Virginia, will be the tiebreaker on party-line votes, increasing his status in the state.

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Less than a month into the General Assembly session, Republicans have passed bills expanding gun rights and rolling back abortion rights, gay rights and — at least as Democrats see it — voting rights. Dozens of other bills remain in the works.

Although it’s no surprise that Republicans would go after those issues, the speed with which they have gotten them past floor votes has surprised some Richmond observers.

“There’s a pent-up demand,’’ said former lieutenant governor John Hager, a Republican who presided over the state Senate for four years. “It says who’s in charge.”

Republicans have not gotten everything they wanted — particularly on abortion and guns — but they have managed with relative ease to approve far-reaching bills. Many of the bills passed the House of Delegates for years but always died at the hands of Democrats and moderate Republicans in the Senate.

Now, with the party in control of the upper chamber, and more conservative Republicans part of it, the full Senate voted this week to require women to undergo an ultrasound before an abortion. On Monday, it is expected to repeal a two-decade-old law limiting handgun purchases to one per month.

Already out of committee and on their way to full Senate votes: bills to subject welfare recipients to drug testing and allow faith-based adoption agencies to turn away, for religious reasons, gays seeking to adopt children.

But those victories come with risks.

Many Republicans, elected last fall primarily on the economy and jobs, could face a backlash in their districts for pushing social causes. And there is a special drawback in an election year in which many Republican candidates for president and the U.S. Senate will need to court independent voters in the swing state, said Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington.

“What they’ve wanted, what they’ve dreamed of, is coming true,” Farnsworth said. “But in the larger electoral context, this may be a very painful course of action if it costs Republicans the presidency or what could be the decisive Senate seat for control of the upper chamber in Washington.”

Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, a Republican who won decisively by downplaying social issues, has said he would sign the ultrasound and one-gun-a-month repeal measures.

The Republican legislative gains have come in a session that began with Democrats vowing to stop the GOP — with legal action and arcane parliamentary maneuvers — from taking control of the Senate. Both strategies failed. And now Democrats find themselves mostly powerless to stop what they see as Virginia’s hard right turn.

Opposed to bills that would apply stricter standards for identification at polling places, Democrats threw out heated rhetoric this week at a rally and on the floor of the House and Senate. They invoked lynching, Jim Crow, even Stalin. They created a Twitter hashtag for the occasion: #NotOnOurWatch.