A Wistful Warner Bids Farewell -- for Now

In addition to transportation, the General Assembly will also tackle myriad other issues. Lawmakers submitted more than 4,000 requests for bills to be drafted this year, a record number.

They include proposals to tighten criminal sanctions, spend more money on college research and environmental cleanup, and slow the growth of health care costs. Others include bills to ban in vitro fertilization for unmarried women and set new standards for abortion clinics. Annual attempts to impose a moratorium on the death penalty could get a boost from recent cases in which convicts have been cleared by new DNA tests.

Those social issues could put Kaine to the test. He campaigned successfully by emphasizing his conservative principles on abortion, and he deftly avoided the question of whether he would support a death penalty moratorium.

A House committee wasted no time in passing a resolution Wednesday that seeks a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. Opponents of the measure reacted angrily because the hearing was uncustomarily held on the first day of session.

Along with the weighty issues are light-hearted ones. One freshman delegate has proposed that people convicted of littering on highways be required to perform 100 hours of community service while wearing a blaze-orange vest bearing the words "I am a litterbug."

Before they could get to bills, however, lawmakers had to resolve disputes over the basic rules that guide their deliberations.

In the House, rules pushed through by the Republican majority strengthen the chamber's subcommittees, giving them new power to kill legislation they deem unnecessary -- without recorded votes. The new rules would also give the House speaker greater power to remove lawmakers from committees and prevent Democrats from picking up an extra seat on committees.

Democrats called the changes a power grab and insisted that the rules were aimed at anonymously killing legislation that the leadership did not agree with, a tactic often used by Democrats when they were in charge.

Staff writers Chris L. Jenkins and Rosalind S. Helderman contributed to this report.