Separating the Political Goats and the Sheep

The News & Advance
Published: June 29, 2008

Well now we know who the problem-solvers and the problem-avoiders are in the Virginia General Assembly.

And we can’t say we’re surprised in the least.

A little more than two weeks ago, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine wrapped up his transportation tour of the state and dropped by the offices of The News & Advance to discuss the upcoming special session of the Assembly he’d called for June 23. In the interview, the governor was realistic about the chances his $1 billion funding proposal faced, especially in the Republican-dominated House of Delegates.

Knowing he’d probably get knee-capped by the anti-tax wing of the GOP calling the shots in the House, Kaine said that, at the very least, Virginia voters would know which of their legislators were problem-solvers and which were problem-avoiders and, come November 2009, could take action if they so chose.

If it’s any surprise, the problem-avoiders, the stick-their-heads-in-the-sand-and-ignore-reality legislators are the majority of House Republicans.

Hypocrites of the highest order, the anti-taxers in the House didn’t even consider the governor’s proposal, a proposal that included funding mechanisms they themselves had voted for just 18 months ago.

In the 2007 Assembly session — the session that gave the commonwealth the much-maligned abusive driver fees to pay for roads, the House Republicans voted to create unelected (an ultimately unconstitutional) regional authorities that would then raise the sales tax on vehicles and would raise the grantor’s fee on real estate transactions in Northern Virginia and Tidewater. Though indirectly, they voted for higher taxes — they just covered themselves with the wilted fig leaf of a regional authority should anyone complain.

Well, the governor took those same funding mechanisms, lowered the amounts and made them statewide to fund transportation needs across the whole of Virginia. That’s all … and still the House Republicans shot him down.

(Out of fairness, we should note the state Senate nixed Kaine’s funding options, too, choosing instead to pay for transportation with a straight-out increase in the gas tax. As we have argued in the past, it’s the most logical funding source, hitting all drivers, in and out-of-state, who use Virginia’s highways.)

But the House GOP leaders chose to do nothing but rail at Kaine and the Senate Democrats, trotting out that old cliché of tax-and-spend liberals.

What was their response to Virginia’s looming transportation crisis? Led by Attorney General Bob McDonnell, the likely GOP gubernatorial candidate in 2009, they called for an audit of the Virginia Department of Transportation to ferret out another of their clichés: waste, fraud and abuse.

The only thing is that that dog simply doesn’t hunt anymore. VDOT has undergone eight — count ’em, eight — audits since 2001, making it the most scrutinized state agency. (An ironic aside, but those eight audits took care of inefficiencies in the highway department that grew in scope during the administration of Republican Jim Gilmore. Oops.)

Because the House GOP “leaders” are so afraid raising a tax here or a fee there, so afraid of enraging their rabidly anti-tax base, so afraid of actually leading, the commonwealth’s transportation problems will likely only fester for another year.

Come November 2009, though, voters — who are sick of politicians with nothing more than tired slogans and no workable solutions — can have their say on the entire mess.