In Richmond, a Cause of Inaction

"Well, I haven't had the opportunity to examine it in detail," she said.

So it goes these days.

The commonwealth's budget embraces about 250 programs. How many of those does the state GOP oppose?

Zero.

Surely, the highest-ranking Republican, Attorney General Jerry Kilgore, has been out pounding the streets, demanding lower spending on this or that, right?

Not exactly. Kilgore's big idea was to institutionalize more debt via a billion-dollar bond issue for education.

"You should never underestimate the intelligence of Virginians," bellowed Kilgore at the rally, inspiring some muted laughter among the attending press. With some reason, too, because the Republican tax-spend position has been premised on a deficit, not a surplus, of public awareness.

The public must not know, for instance, that the past two Republican governors -- George Allen and Jim Gilmore -- outspent all their predecessors. Also that, since 1995, a nonstop parade of special tax deals (not including the billion-dollar car-tax cut) has sliced more than a billion off annual state revenue.

The public also has to be oblivious to the fact that federal funds, tuition and fees, child-support payments, unemployment compensation and other pass-through items drive the growth of the state budget. The spending directly controlled by the General Assembly -- the part that supports education, public safety and nursing homes -- has grown a grandiose one-tenth of 1 percent during the past three years.

And the public has to be unaware of the growing prison population and the rising demands on public schools. Best be ignorant, too, of the drain on Virginia's most reliable and tradition-laden agency, the Virginia State Police, which has been losing officers to backwater police departments, thanks to low state pay. State police officers are buying their own cell phones these days because the department's 1970-vintage radio system doesn't cut it.

Hand it to Grover Norquist, the unrelenting anti-tax activist. He recently told the Wall Street Journal that the no-tax position in Virginia was, in the end, all about protecting the brand. Tax-raising state Republicans, Norquist said, "are the rats' heads in the Coke bottle."

Sweetly expressed. But Norquist doesn't have to deal with the street-level reality of the state budget. The no-tax Virginia Republicans do, and their "branding" -- the sum and substance of their no-cause cause -- is beginning to lose its market appeal.

gcmorse@cox.net