Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 28, 1993 TAG: 9302280080
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG SCHNEIDER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium
IT LACKED GLORY, BUT IT ENDED JUST THE SAME
The winter sun melted the snow off George Washington's bronze head and the bells of St. Paul's Church rang on the quarter-hour, and every little drip and dingdong around the state Capitol on Saturday seemed to celebrate the same thing:Sine die!
That's Latin for "indefinite adjournment," the end of the session, the grand finale of the 1993 General Assembly.
Or not-so-grand.
"This session started out with a bang," said Del. William Mims, R-Leesburg, during the last debate on the last bill of the last day, "but it's going to end with a whimper."
He meant House Bill 2117. After all the dramatic votes on regulating handgun purchases, after the agonizing back-and-forth over tightening day-care guidelines, the delegates got hung up on a bill to let subscribers of Virginia Wildlife magazine keep their names from being sold to mailing lists.
What did Mims expect? Saturday, the 46th day of the session, began with both Houses of the Assembly focusing on just about everything but legislation.
Hunter Andrews, the imperious Senate majority leader from Hampton, read a resolution filed by the boys and girls serving as Senate pages and messengers.
"The female pages took a secret ballot and voted the lieutenant governor [Donald Beyer] `Major Babe of the Session,' " Andrews read with patrician grandeur. The pages also noted, he said, that "senators are not gods but real human beings who laugh and talk."
In the House of Delegates, the atmosphere was unusually somber, with members paying respects to several who've decided not to seek re-election this fall. There were standing ovations, gifts (one departing delegate got a black silk bathrobe) and tears of tribute, culminating in one politician being deemed "today's version of Patrick Henry."
All of which moved Del. Jay DeBoer, D-Petersburg, to proclaim dryly that "my seatmate wanted to announce his retirement to go into the ministry."
The real action, of course, was behind the scenes, as small committees of delegates and senators met to hammer out compromises on bills that had passed each body in different forms.
Throughout the Capitol, the politicians clustered and negotiated and bickered and dickered. Most seemed weary from the long weeks of work.
But it wasn't exactly a whimper that ended the session. It was a speech by Del. George Grayson, D-Williamsburg, explaining why it was OK to make the Virginia Wildlife's magazine's subscription list secret under the Freedom of Information Act.
"If the FOI were a Rembrandt painting," argued the thesaurus-tongued Grayson, a college professor, "where you have men and women and furniture perfectly positioned, we would have no business adjusting it so. But the Freedom of Information Act is really more like a Jackson Pollock action painting, full of drops of paint and illuminations of sunlight and infusions of color. This will not do much to disturb the symmetry of that act."
By the last few words, delegates were begging for the vote. The bill passed. Moments later, at 5:43 p.m., the session adjourned.
Sine die.