Ruling Republican powers in the Virginia House of Delegates should be sending flowers to the Democrat who introduced the inane "droopy drawers" bill because the attention that bill drew obscured the institutional wretchedness to which the body has descended.
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.
House districts, precisely shaped to mass and isolate Democrats while protecting incumbent Republicans, have left GOP House members answerable to narrow constituent groups. What delights fevered Republican activists, however, rings like a cracked gong to the general electorate. Partisan districting has rendered House Republican policies fiscally incoherent and has left the House itself resembling a lost redoubt of Deep South, anti-whoever cracker politics.
What has been the one constant in Virginia GOP mass mailings, campaign commercials and stump rhetoric? Vilification of growing public expenditures and resulting "big government." 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.
Mind you, many may view these spending requests as laudable. But if you spend years anchoring your politics in one place (spend not), then run off in the opposite direction (spend a lot), it gets noticed.
Noticed, too, was the tortured financing of the transportation package considered in the closing days of the session. Heralded by Howell as the most and the best, it relies substantially upon revenue that normally would support education, public safety and other core state responsibilities. The package was concocted largely by the House in the cause of moving forward without political inconvenience -- i.e., by not raising taxes or instituting tolls.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman John H. Chichester (R-Northumberland) called the transportation package "minuscule," and he was right.
That's not the worst of the session, though, because a number of junior-grade House Republicans decided to rummage for votes, as the Staunton News Leader wryly put it last week, in "the final frontier of discrimination, now that blacks have attained civil rights."
Thus, alarms have gone out over an illegal rabble burdening the schools, sapping the health clinics and seeking driver's licenses while speaking strange, un-American languages. These people -- immigrants all and not supposed to show up unless delivering mulch -- were the beneficiaries of considerable attention this session.
They were not alone. How about those homosexuals? Bad enough that they want to marry and adopt children, but now they're running clubs in our schools, and you can imagine what that entails.
By all accounts, the Gay-Straight Alliance club organized at Harrisonburg High School sought to promote tolerance. But tolerating homosexuality is the same as encouraging it, one speaker told a Senate committee.
