Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 16, 1995 TAG: 9502240009
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Last week Republicans themselves joined Democrats in rejecting Allen's proposed budget cuts. Not a single GOP lawmaker voted for them.
Still, if Virginia Democrats were wise, they'd restrain their crowing.
Majority Leader Richard Cranwell of Vinton deserves credit, to be sure, for helping engineer the defeat of Allen budget amendments that would have cut state support for education, cultural institutions and other investments in Virginia's future. In Richmond's rough-and-tumble political climate, supercharged by GOP ambitions of gaining control of the legislature in the next election, a certain amount of partisan maneuvering and one-upmanship is to be expected.
But Democrats have relished their victory a bit obviously. "[We] took King George to the level of Boy George," boasted State Sen. Edward Houck, D-Spotsylvania, as if the point of the session were to score political points, win parliamentary games and emasculate the opposition.
The Democrats insist, with some cause, that the governor started the fight, with his take-no-prisoners rhetoric and his calculated attempt to intimidate lawmakers, manipulate public opinion and orchestrate a November GOP takeover of the assembly by introducing budget amendments designed to put Democrats on record against tax cuts.
It's also fair to note that, while the package of budget cuts unanimously repudiated by Republicans did not include Allen's proposed tax cuts, the governor had not argued that these spending cuts were only for the purpose of providing tax relief. In many instances, he contended that they represented activities of government in themselves hard to justify.
Even so, most Virginians, we dare guess, see more silliness than substance in the dispatches from Richmond, and are weary of the games.
Sound and fury continued to erupt this week, after GOP Del. John Watkins released copies of a Democratic strategy memo mistakenly delivered to his office. Republicans sputter about the game plan's "sleazy" tips, derived from politics rather than policy, for scuttling the governor's program. Democrats are shocked - shocked! - that Watkins would read, copy and distribute someone else's mail.
Blah, blah, blah.
Most Virginians, we suspect, aren't awed by trembling expressions of outrage. Neither are they impressed by shrill insistence that the other guy started it, or by earnest assurances that the defeated party only got its due. The point of a session, most Virginians probably would say, should be to serve the people, not the parties - and this is a task requiring adulthood, if not always solemnity.
It may be too much to expect a return to former standards of civility, what with a governor apparently less interested in consulting than in winning (defined as gaining national political stature), and with so tantalizingly real a possibility of change in majority control of the assembly.
But if partisan games crowd out too much of the people's business, confidence in public institutions can only erode - a result to be feared as much in Virginia as across the nation.
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GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1995
by CNB