03/07/12: Virginia’s three-party system

This op-ed appeared in The Virginian-Pilot on the date shown.

WISHFUL thinking.

That was the biggest reason that I concluded last week that sanity had returned to the Virginia Senate. With its defeat of certain measures, notably the personhood bill and the repeal of the HPV vaccine, I wrote a column in anticipation that the Senate would render a similar fate to the ultrasound bill.

I was wrong. Instead, the bill passed. Virginia women seeking an abortion will now have to undergo an unnecessary — and costly — medical procedure. There is small consolation in an amendment to the bill that exempts the victims of rape and incest. That the bill got so far without that exception is indicative of how much those voting actually know each bill’s contents.

In hindsight, I probably should have pulled the column completely because there wasn’t time for a complete rewrite, one that would have reflected the outrage I felt.

While it is true that some sanity has returned to the Senate, this vote proved that not nearly enough has returned.

With a Senate evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, only one Republican vote was necessary to kill the ultrasound bill. The final tally did include a sole Republican “nay” — from Sen. John Watkins of Midlothian.

It was the Senate Democrats who failed to hold all of their votes. Two of them, Charles Colgan of Prince William and Phil Puckett of Russell, voted with the majority to pass the bill.

The 20 Senate Democrats can stick together to hold up the budget but can’t do the same when women’s rights are at stake. That isn’t sanity.

While I think Senate Republicans erred in not sharing power with the Democrats, that ship has sailed. Holding up the budget, with all that is riding on it, demonstrates that power is of the utmost importance.

It is no secret that politics is mostly about power, particularly that of political parties. George Washington was prescient in his farewell address in 1796, saying, “However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

We’ve seen this occur at the national level, and now it has come to Richmond.

There used to be a saying that there were three parties in the General Assembly: the House Republicans, the Senate Republicans and the Democrats. We still have three, except now they are the House Democrats, the Senate Democrats and the Republicans.

We saw this split earlier this year on congressional redistricting, with some House Democrats voting in favor of the Republican-drawn bill. We are now seeing it on the budget.

After both the House and Senate versions of the budget were defeated by Senate Democrats, the only way another budget could be introduced was with the unanimous consent of the House, which was granted. The citizen in me says the House Democrats voted in favor because it was the right thing to do for the people of Virginia. The cynic in me says they did so because they face re-election next year.

If Senate Democrats continue to hold the budget hostage to their attempts to force power-sharing, they will have, to paraphrase Washington, subverted the power of the people.

And that’s insane.