In 2020, state Sen. Janet Howell, D-Fairfax, chair of the Senate Finance and Appropriations committee, and Del. Luke Torian, D-Prince William, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, conferred in a hallway inside the state Capitol.
The special session of the Virginia legislature last year began in the depths of summer and reached into autumn. It was an 83-day marathon, longer than lawmakers’ annual winter get-together, with an agenda driven by the economic aftershocks of the COVID-19 outbreak and the racial reckoning sparked by the police killing of George Floyd.
The Democrat-controlled General Assembly convened Aug. 18, 2020, and finally quit Nov. 9. The House of Delegates met mostly virtually and the Virginia Senate, in person, in a socially distanced, masks-required setting at the Science Museum of Virginia, several miles from the state Capitol.
Another special session begins Monday, again in the depths of summer, and if it runs beyond Aug. 12, an informal deadline batted around by legislators, staff and lobbyists, the majority party fears running into trouble in autumn — at the polls. For Democrats, this go-around — the legislature will return to the statehouse — is about getting out of town.
Against the backdrop of elections for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and the House, the special session — for usually restive Democrats — is about discipline, steering to state programs $4.3 billion in a second wave of federal pandemic relief funds and doing so with as little fuss as possible.
And they don’t have to touch until next year a $2.6 billion surplus attributed to the early bounce-back from the pandemic.
