ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, March 12, 1996 TAG: 9603120070
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITORIAL EDITION: METRO
SILLINESS wasn't entirely absent from the just-ended session of the Virginia General Assembly. But the lawmakers did succeed in toning down the partisan fireworks of a year earlier, and they went about the people's business with reasonable civility.
The results: a decent budget with more money for the public schools and higher education, plus some for such initiatives as juvenile-justice reform, the new Urban Partnership, and new learning standards designed to hold schools more accountable.
To be sure, a lot of bad decisions were made. And a lot of things that need to get done - such as raising Virginia's lowest-in-the-nation cigarette tax - never even made it to the table. But this hardly counts as news as far as assembly sessions go.
To be sure, too, a dispute over whether each chamber should have four budget conferees (the House of Delegates position) or five (the state Senate's) managed to add two days to the session's allotment of three score. Gov. George Allen continued trying to score an ideological point at a cost to the state of $6 million in federal Goals 2000 school funds. But a two-day delay in passing a budget is as nothing compared with the budget gridlocks in Washington.
On the whole, the governor eschewed the role of Scourge of the Right, which had played to bad reviews the year before, and instead acted in the Virginia tradition of pragmatic conservatism. Likewise, assembly Democrats accorded Allen the respect his office deserves; there was nothing like last year's embarrassing refusal to allow the governor to deliver his state of the commonwealth speech to a joint session of the assembly.
And through it all, the Senate operated under an unprecedented power-sharing arrangement. If Virginia is fortunate, the arrangement could set the stage for more equitable distributions of power in the future.
No small part of the credit for this should go to the voters of Virginia, for what happened in this past November's legislative elections.
At the time, the elections seemed to have changed little. The party composition of the House of Delegates stayed the same as before: 52 Democrats, 47 Republicans and one independent. Several state Senate seats changed hands, including Roanoke's, and the GOP made a net gain of two. But that simply shrank control from narrowly Democratic, 22-18, to very narrowly so, 20-20 with a Democratic lieutenant governor as the presiding tiebreaker.
But like the dog in the Sherlock Holmes story that didn't bark in the night, what didn't occur in November now appears significant. After Allen's big-margin election in 1993 and the election of a Republican Congress in 1994, the GOP surge was at least temporarily abeyed in Virginia in 1995. Moreover, the Democrats held on by campaigning specifically against the agenda Allen had sought, and failed to win, in last year's legislative session.
The Democrats, on the other hand, couldn't exactly call it victory when they gained no seats in the House and lost two in the Senate. Democrats' plans to use Lt. Gov. Don Beyer's tie-breaker vote to organize the Senate unilaterally could have led to gridlock and wheel-spinning litigation. Instead, partly because Virgil Goode of Rocky Mount rightly refused to go along with the idea, the Senate adopted innovations like a Senate Finance Committee congenially co-chaired by Democrat Stanley Walker and Republican John Chichester. That led to other oddities, like Republican Chichester's naming Democrat Goode as a budget conferee.
Circumstances peculiar to the time and place shaped the unusual arrangement. But so did a dawning perception that Virginians are less interested in ideological battles than in state government that operates effectively and efficiently. May the perception outlive this particular session.
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines KEYWORDS: GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1996by CNB