Schapiro: Full-time politics shapes Va. legislature at half-time | Crime-and-courts

Just over 30 days into the 60-day session, Republicans and Democrats are very much in character; that is, loathing each other.

Republicans are using their four-vote edge in the House of Delegates to pass bills you would expect them to support and to kill those their base would never tolerate. In the Senate, where Democratic control hangs on a single vote, the Republican wish-list is in tatters.

This portends impasse, particularly on volatile issues, unless the parties — and the new and largely untested governor, Republican Glenn Youngkin — do something rare in a divided Capitol: compromise. Standoff has benefits: It keeps Virginia centered, preventing a state seen last as swinging too far to the left, from swinging too far to the right.

There are encouraging signs on tax relief and education reform — Youngkin priorities — but lawmakers are already at a dead end on abortion, voting rights, guns and criminal sentencing. A plan for retail sales of reefer — legalized for personal use last year, when Democrats had total control of state government — appears to have gone up in smoke.

There are indications Richmond may get its do-over this November on a casino rejected by voters last November, legislators having defeated a proposal by Sen. Joe Morrissey, D-Richmond, to limit a gambling referendum to benighted Petersburg.

But there are many ways to revive moribund bills before the scheduled adjournment, March 12.

Indeed, when the arcane rules of the General Assembly and the ambitions of its members intersect, anything can happen. It is a reminder, as Tim Kaine would say as lieutenant governor and governor, that when it comes to legislation and the personalities and politics driving it, everything is connected.

Since the opening of the General Assembly, there has been a stream of snark that has escalated as the positions of Republicans and Democrats harden.

By week’s end the battle over Youngkin’s nomination for natural resources secretary of Andrew Wheeler, the former coal lobbyist who led the Environmental Protection Agency for President Donald Trump, threatened collateral casualties.

House Republicans, furious that Senate Democrats have all but killed the Wheeler nomination, retaliated by refusing to confirm hundreds of appointments to boards and commissions by Youngkin’s Democratic predecessor, Ralph Northam. Within several hours, both sides retreated somewhat, casting doubt on only a handful of nominations but not before further poisoning a political culture long known for civility.

Ordinarily, confirmation would be routine — a courtesy to a former governor.

But these are not ordinary times.

The jarring effects of a change in power — one many Democrats had not anticipated, believing antipathy for Trump had permanently recast Virginia from purple to blue — have been numerous and immediate, with one of such constitutional magnitude that the courts were asked to intervene.

Youngkin, who as cheerful, fleece vest-wearing candidate said he would not challenge a COVID-19 mask mandate for students and school staff, issued an executive order that, in effect, would upend it by giving parents an opt-out.

Ruling in a challenge by school districts in seven Democratic localities, including Richmond, a Northern Virginia judge said Youngkin had no authority to intervene; that a law enacted during a peak in the pandemic left the matter to local officials.

Fearing more political fallout from coronavirus fatigue, three Senate Democrats broke ranks to push through a measure that would immediately clear legal obstacles to junking the mask requirements. The legislation would do what the court said Youngkin’s couldn’t, ensuring a win for the governor that was threatened by his constitutionally dubious order.

When delegates and senators convened Jan. 12, the new Republican Speaker of the House, Todd Gilbert of Shenandoah County, distinguished himself in an entirely different role: internet troll, savaging Northam on Twitter for a farewell address that, to Gilbert, was a weepy lecture in white guilt.

Democrats piled on Republicans for burying a measure that would allow Virginians to remove from the state constitution an unconstitutional provision blocking same-sex marriage. A gay delegate, Democrat Dawn Adams of Richmond, was in tears that Republicans favored preserving the existing amendment and the Family Foundation said it is a safeguard against polygamy.

Jason Miyares, the rookie attorney general, purged his office of some Democrats, actual and suspected; then — lest he be seen as too loyal to Trump — apparently forced the resignation of a top lawyer who declared on Facebook the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol were “patriots” and that Trump had won the 2020 election. Democrats howled over both.

And Youngkin, alternately, the state’s chief executive and an emerging Fox News personality, was on Sean Hannity and Martha MacCallum, auditioning for 2024 and beyond. Courting COVID-19 skeptics and parents-rights voters outside Virginia, Youngkin was a lapdog and an attack dog, pivoting from Trump-lite to Trump-bright.

For Hannity, one of conservative media’s perceived kingmakers, Youngkin preened over his anticipated victory on relaxing school mask mandates, gushing that it represented a bipartisan breakthrough, never mind that it was achieved with minimal Democratic support.

But in his interview the following day with MacCallum, Youngkin — sitting in a classroom-like setting surrounded by supporters — heaped scorn on Democrats, saying they put teachers unions ahead of parents in crafting policies that, pegged to troubling cultural and racial issues, are remaking education as indoctrination.

Voters chose divided government for Virginia because of disappointment with President Joe Biden, who carried the state by 10 percentage points. They were put off by the inaction of Democrats on promised social legislation, inflation fears and the disruptive effects of the pandemic.

Despite Youngkin’s slender victory over Terry McAuliffe and their narrow advantage in the House, Republicans have been emboldened to behave as Democrats warned they would: attempting to restore voter restrictions that, having been eased because of the virus, fueled record GOP turnout, and pushing, albeit briefly, a ban on abortion after 20 weeks.

The retreat on abortion suggested continuing Republican uncertainty on the measure; that even with an anti-abortion Democrat, Joe Morrissey, willing to side with the GOP, there is no guarantee it could clear the Senate and go to Youngkin for his signature.

Thus, both parties are playing a defensive game — one occasionally shaped by the oddities of the rules. Among them: That the lieutenant governor, as the presiding officer of the Senate, must break most tie votes, giving extraordinary power these days to the Republican who guides the Democrat-controlled chamber.

And Winsome Earle-Sears exercised it for the first time Thursday, voting no, to defeat a Democratic bill requiring that judges explain criminal penalties that depart from sentencing guidelines. But she did so judiciously — announcing her vote only after conferring privately for about five minutes with senators on both sides of the issue.