THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, March 4, 1996 TAG: 9603040036
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1996
SOURCE: BY ROBERT LITTLE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long : 257 lines
Randy Foster likes his hair long and his engine loud.
The ends of his shaggy mustache are the same Marlboro yellow as his fingers and his teeth. The only wingtips he ever wears point off his Harley Davidson belt buckle.
Foster stood out around the General Assembly for so many reasons. He looked wrong, for one thing, cutting the marble hallways in biker boots and smudgy blue jeans. And the slangy way he talked was wrong. The stale nicotine smell wasn't exactly right.
But it gets worse. He was helpless; he didn't know where anything was, or how to find out. Foster didn't even know who his senator and delegate are, or, for that matter, what the difference is.
Not a lobbyist or journalist or political hack, Foster was just some guy. A dump-truck driver from Southside, by his nature an outcast around the General Assembly.
To an everyday Virginian, participating in the legislative process can be like trying to pull Excalibur out of the rock. You're welcome to give it a try, but without the right kinship you don't stand a chance.
The Assembly can be a regal, respected and efficacious bunch, taking great pains to bare all and listen to the people.
But state lawmaking can also be a cliquish, brutish and convoluted process, one not at all accommodating to the uninitiated masses it serves.
``I can't even figure out what's happening sometimes, and I've been doing this for five years,'' said Portsmouth Sen. Louise Lucas. ``People have to trust us, I guess. Because they'll never be able to break in.''
Foster was one of the few who tried. He drove to Richmond on his day off last month because he heard the state government wanted to make his wolf dog, Buds, illegal to own without a special license.
A call to the Assembly's information office would have given him a bill number and directions to a committee meeting, but Foster didn't know that. And he couldn't tell what the committee was doing once he found it.
By the time he figured out that ``reporting'' a bill meant passing it, members had named a special subcommittee to study his issue and scheduled a meeting for the next day. Foster couldn't come back. He talked briefly with a legislative aide, then left for home.
``That's all I could do,'' said Foster, 31. ``None of them knows me or my dog, and I sort of figured they should before they go doing stuff to me. My opinion's worth something, but I bet it didn't even matter.''
Foster's experience is not that unusual for the few commoners who trouble to bang the doors of the Emerald City. There's an exclusive and powerful kingdom inside the boundaries of Richmond's Capitol Square, one with a language, caste system and societal privilege all its own.
General Assembly members have their own doctor and post office, their own police force, even their own license plates. Their food and lodging is free, and there's a party almost every night of the week.
Kids skip school for weeks to fetch them coffee and sandwiches, or ferry their messages from room to room. Grown men in uniform stand all afternoon holding the handles to the chamber doors, ready to swing them open when a member wants in or out.
While Richmond schools were snowed shut for a week, two state plows kept the Capitol Square driveways shaved to the asphalt. In warmer weather, groundskeepers drain and scrub the fountains every week or so, to keep the water a shimmery blue.
Members are allowed $92 a day for food and lodging, not that most would need it. The clerks keep a social calendar of cocktail receptions and lobbyist soirees that can keep an indulgent lawmaker living large right up to the last drop of the gavel. Rumor has it that some legislators arrive each year with a special midsession wardrobe - with roomier dimensions to accommodate their expansive social schedule.
``You could forget you're here to work if you let yourself,'' said Norfolk Del. Jerrauld C. Jones, a nine-year veteran. ``And some people probably do.''
It's not that real people aren't welcome in the General Assembly. Virtually every legislative twitch happens in public, broadcast over microphones and gnawed on by the press. A lawmaker in Capitol Square sometimes looks like the pope wading through the stands at a Brazilian soccer match, except that it's mostly reporters and lobbyists clamoring to kiss the ring.
``I had a group the other day follow me into the men's room!'' gasped Sen. Edward Schrock, a freshman from Virginia Beach. ``I had to tell them, `Look, this is crossing the line. Any business I do in here is not your business.' ''
The difficulty for outsiders cracking the system isn't one of access so much as one of convenience. Elementary civics will teach you how a bill becomes a law; you have to live and work in the capital to know where and when it happens.
That's why lobbyists and reporters make camp in Richmond throughout the annual fete, creating, with the lawmakers, their own capital culture. They need to stay close because events unfold quickly and a lot of information is carried by word of mouth. There's no firm schedule of when bills come up in committees, for instance. People have to stay in touch with chairmen, with aides, with staff. The uninitiated might grab the daily calendar of events, but it so rarely reveals all the true political gyrations.
Consider this year's customary ``parental notification'' bill. The idea of prohibiting doctors from performing abortions on minors without first telling parents comes up every year.
The Assembly held public hearings on the issue, and published the dates on the official schedule. Pro-lifers hemmed, pro-choicers hawed, the hearing rooms overflowed with spectators. Though lobbyists orchestrated the debate, it was nonetheless a substantive hash.
And it was all, basically, a sham.
The insiders knew before the hearings started how the committees would vote - if not precisely, then at least in general. Everyone pitched for the cameras, mostly, and the press was happy to let them do it.
The most important vote so far this year on parental notification came late one afternoon in the Capitol's Old Senate Chamber, a creaky side-room reserved for closed-door confabs and parliamentary quickies. The Senate's obscure Rules Committee considered whether to send the bill to the friendly Courts of Justice Committee, where it stood a much better chance of becoming law.
The meeting had been scheduled the night before, and began immediately after the full Senate adjourned. Few knew it was happening or understood why, and no public comment was allowed. The vote was close but the committee decided to do nothing, keeping the bill in the committee that had already killed another version. The whole meeting took less than 10 minutes. They never even turned on the lights.
``It was no ambush; we just had to take the vote,'' said Sen. Richard J. Holland, chairman of the Rules Committee. ``Sometimes, that's how it's done.''
So much of the state's lawmaking is done that way: a brief public hearing on the record, then weeks of swaps and schmoozes and cloakroom arm-twisting over the details.
Sometimes lawmakers call committee meetings on the chamber floor as soon as the session ends. The public isn't even allowed on the floor. ``Distinguished persons'' sometimes are - Miss Virginia, foreign dignitaries, the punter for the Dallas Cowboys - but only by a two-thirds vote.
Even crafting the budget - the legislature's most monumental and conspicuous task - is largely a clandestine affair. The members hold hearings and committee meetings to discuss the state's needs and priorities. But then eight or 10 of the legislature's most senior members grind out all the particulars in private pow-wows.
There's no great deception to it all. Virginia has been making laws that way for centuries, and legislators will tell you that they've made some pretty darned good ones, thank you very much.
It's just that the annual session is a lot like a parachute jump. The legislators spend all year practicing techniques, gathering advice and packing their chutes, but when the time comes to leap they're on their own. And things can get pretty terrifying toward the end.
This year's session lasts 60 days because the budget is due. Next year's will be 45. Either way, for the lawmakers it means long nights and 14-hour days, especially in the final weeks. There are some personal and political spoils, for sure. But a lot of thankless minutiae as well.
``With all the comedy, with all the laughter, we are a tightly organized body that begins its work on time and ends its work on time and meets all its intermediate deadlines on time,'' said Sen. Joseph V. Gartlan Jr. from Fairfax.
``Let's don't ever forget, or let the people of Virginia forget, why we're really here: to do their business.''
It's not just business, but theater too. There's the wondrous swagger, the imperious swashbuckling on the chamber floor. Like when Charles Hawkins, a haberdasher from Danville, spectacles in one hand, thunders at his colleagues as if he were drilling into the foundation. (Senators stand on a rich red carpet, chosen because it matches the red rug in the British House of Lords, by the way. Not the House of Commons, mind you, but the Upper Chamber.)
The Senate often produces some right priggish dialogue, thusly unintelligible:
``Mr. President, would the senator yield for a question?''
``I yield, Mr. President.''
``The senator yields.''
``Mr. President, I would ask the senator, is this bill really necessary?''
``Mr. President, I would answer the gentleman, yes. I think it is.''
Too stuffy for you? Try the House of Delegates at the other end of the hall. On a good day, it's just a few goofy hats short of your average lodge meeting.
A lot gets done, for sure. The House is the harder working of the two chambers. But it is also the sillier, known for a sometimes embarrassing level of prankishness.
Delegates often whistle the ``Jeopardy!'' theme during delays. They bleat at the goat milk bill, bark for the pet grooming legislation. Pity the lawmaker who dares enter a bill about snakes, and risk being sisssssed off the chamber floor.
A bill about massage therapy this year had delegates moaning in faux ecstasy. Fairfax Del. Richard L. Fisher cracked that some Senate amendments put it in the ``proper posture.''
A few more lawmakers made equally limp attempts at humor, then Henry County Del. Ward L. Armstrong stood and released the kicker: ``Nobody else will say it, Mr. Speaker, but those amendments rub me the wrong way.''
It gets a little racier sometimes.
On Feb. 8, the House debated a law that allows some localities to use cameras to catch motorists who run red lights. Armstrong thought people who weren't driving when their car was photographed might be compelled to turn in their husbands or wives.
``I don't think I want to be in a position to rat on my spouse,'' Armstrong said.
Speaker Thomas W. Moss Jr. of Norfolk interjected: ``I've seen the gentleman's spouse, and I don't think I'd rat on her either.''
A few minutes later, Manassas Del. Bob Marshall offers that Germany has a similar law. There, the complaint is not having to tell on a spouse but getting photographed in a car with someone other than a legal beloved.
Moss shakes his head and does a poor job of concealing a grin. The House members begin to chant, ``Gone, gone, gone.''
They vote against the bill, 36-63.
It's not simple, running the state. It's even tougher when you share the job with 139 other people, and have to persuade the voters to let you keep doing it.
The lawmakers in the General Assembly have never killed anyone, at least since people can remember. But they've paid the teachers and the state police, fixed the roads and built the prisons. They sell the lottery tickets and the booze in the state. They say how much your truck can weigh, and how fast it can go.
And they decide things like what kind of drugs your optometrist can prescribe, or how much of your foot the podiatrists can cut off. They say what's a crime and what's not.
And they often do it in ways too insular to penetrate, or too tangled and hectic to understand. But they let you watch. As long as you stay out of the way and at least try to fit in.
For Keith Scott, that started with his sport coat. The ruins of an old gray suit, actually, with two vents in the back and an M-shaped seam across the shoulders. It bunched up to the base of his skull as he squeezed into a chair in the Senate gallery.
Scott lives in Harrisonburg, but was visiting his sister in Richmond earlier this month and decided to see the sights. He had never been to the Capitol or watched the legislature, so he grabbed a copy of the calendar, perched himself near the rafters and decided to follow along.
Here's what the Senate did with a campaign disclosure bill that caught his eye:
Adopted the committee report.
Waived the reading of a technical floor amendment, then adopted it.
Suspended the rules, engrossed the bill and advanced it to its third constitutional reading as part of a block.
Removed the bill from the block.
Reconsidered the vote by which the rules were suspended and put the bill back on its second reading.
Passed the bill by for the day.
Get the picture?
Neither did he.
``Does that mean they voted for it?'' asked Scott, a 55-year-old building contractor. Actually, it meant they almost passed it, then decided to do nothing and wait a day.
``They voted on it a lot for not doing anything with it,'' he said. ``I guess those fellas know what they're doing.'' MEMO: Staff writer David M. Poole contributed to this report.
ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photos]
Norfolk's Sen. Stanley C. Walker confers on the floor - sacred
ground - with John H. Chichester of Fredericksburg.
BILL TIERNAN photos
The Virginian-Pilot
Lobbyists Jean Banks, far left, and Michelle Allen wait to speak
with Sen. Stanley C. Walker. Jana Price-Davis, center, also a
lobbyist, was awaiting a meeting of the Senate Finance Committee, as
was Lt. Gov. Donald S. Beyer Jr., far right.
BILL TIERNAN photos
The Virginian-Pilot
If you're a lobbyist or a lieutenant governor, the Assembly might
stymie you at times, but not as frequently as it does the Average
Joe. From left, lobbyists Jean Banks, Michelle Allen and Jana
Price-Davis await lawmakers, as does Lt. Gov. Don Beyer.
KEYWORDS: GENERAL ASSEMBLY by CNB