The Grown-Ups Step In
Time to mediate in Virginia's GOP fratricide

Sunday, December 31, 2006

FINALLY, THE grown-ups have seen fit to mediate in the spitting match that passes for fraternal relations within Virginia's Republican Party. Northern Virginia's two Republican congressmen, Reps. Thomas M. Davis III and Frank R. Wolf, along with the new state party chairman, Ed Gillespie, and Robert F. McDonnell, the attorney general, are trying to broker an intraparty deal on state funding for transportation. No doubt they have been moved to action by well-founded fear -- fear that voters have grown tired and testy at the ongoing spectacle of the GOP's civil war and fear that the party as a whole will be punished at the ballot box next fall for its contemptible failure to address the state's transportation mess. Whatever the motive for the intervention, here's the only way the mess will be solved: with taxes.

It's been 20 years since Virginia (with a Democratic governor and a Democrat-controlled state legislature) tapped a new funding source for its overstressed roads and rails. Since then, the state's population and economy have boomed, and traffic has mounted in key areas. Meanwhile, the legislature has come under the control of Republicans divided into Senate moderates, who grasp that roads require an adequate, stable, long-term source of revenue, and House fundamentalists, whose anti-tax zealotry has blocked any reasonable funding plan.

Billions in new revenue are needed to deal just with Northern Virginia's road mess and to ensure that maintenance costs do not deplete the state's entire road-building budget within the next few years. But the House has managed to propose only short-term, small-potatoes, gimmicky fixes designed more to provide political cover than deal with a generational problem. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, a Democrat, has rightly rejected those and insisted on a long-term approach. The result: political gridlock to match that on Virginia's roads.

Now Republican leaders are looking at the ballot next November, and they don't like what they see. All 140 members of the state's General Assembly will be up for reelection, and plenty of voters may not take the trouble to sort the good Republicans from the bad -- that is, to distinguish between those who comprehend that new taxes are unavoidable and those whose allegiance is more to conservative Republican orthodoxy than to the everyday concerns of commuters. They're more likely just to vote against candidates with an R after their names and be done with it.

So party elders are knocking heads. So far, according to reporting by The Post's Michael D. Shear, there is little to show for their efforts.

No one likes higher taxes. But without them, the state's most populous and dynamic regions -- Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads -- will strangle on their own congestion. Let's hope the GOP grown-ups can sell a new year's resolution to the party's hard-liners -- preferably one that involves investing in the state's future before it's too late.