REPUBLICANS IN VIRGINIA won effective control of the state Senate in last week’s elections, thereby gaining full power over the legislature and governor’s mansion in Richmond for the first time in a decade. They wasted no time in vowing to enact legislation on immigration, gun control, abortion and other combustible social issues — even though few Republican candidates emphasized those issues on the campaign trail. Our view is that pursuing a radical social agenda would misread the wafer-thin mandate they’ve been handed. It could also sow seeds of electoral setbacks.
The GOP victory lacked the drama of a landslide: The Senate’s new partisan divide, with each party holding 20 seats, favors the Republicans only because of the tie-breaking clout of the lieutenant governor. That alone should represent a cautionary note for the party’s bigwigs.
A more notable blinking yellow light is the fact that most Republican campaigns in Virginia did not stress social issues, and many hardly mentioned them at all. They ran, and won, on opposing new taxes, promising an even friendlier business climate and vowing to create jobs. Republican candidates, particularly in Northern Virginia, said they were rarely asked about social issues — or, in many cases, any state or local issues at all — as they campaigned.
Given that, it’s pretty clear there’s no mandate in Virginia for an Arizona-style assault on illegal immigrants. There’s no directive from the electorate for a Mississippi-style proposal conferring civil rights on fetuses. There’s no popular demand for Virginia to become the gun-happiest state this side of Texas; to harass welfare recipients by forcing them to submit to drug tests; to slash education spending, gut environmental programs or fire workers for not speaking English.
Those are among the proposals Republican lawmakers, particularly in the GOP-dominated House of Delegates, are putting forward.
In what has been, in recent years, one of America’s most purple states — not reliably Democratic or Republican — Virginians of both parties have valued the commonwealth’s moderate political culture, traditions and policies. In the late 1990s, the last time the General Assembly was so divided as the Senate will be starting in January, the two parties fashioned a power-sharing arrangement, splitting committee chairmanships and other perks and working cooperatively on a range of initiatives. But this time, Republicans are rejecting the suggestion of sharing power in the Senate.
Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R), like his two Democratic predecessors, has burnished his popularity in part by rejecting an inflammatory tone and reaching out beyond his inner circle. We hope the temptations of one-party rule don’t lead his party away from civility and a respect for those who found themselves — for this year, anyway — on the losing side.
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