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There
will never be enough government spending for some
legislators. Although the long-delayed state budget
that the General Assembly enacted in recent days
will increase appropriations dramatically over the
current level of expenditures, Sen. Mary Margaret
Whipple, D-Arlington, complained: “There are still
many needs in the Commonwealth that must be
addressed.” This statement warrants parsing.
Does
the word “needs” mean that every demand for
government funding deserves funding? If not, how
should legislators decide what should be funded?
When Sen. Whipple says that unfunded needs
“must” be addressed, does she mean that
legislators have an obligation to raise taxes until
all needs are satisfied? Sadly, that is precisely
what some lawmakers seem to believe. We should be
thankful the General Assembly adjourned when it did
this year.
Even
if we were to agree on definitions, state budgeting
would continue to be contentious. There never will
be complete agreement on what in fact fits those
definitions. And there will never be enough money to
fund everything that legislators want to include in
the budget.
We
need to be reminded occasionally that negotiations
and compromise are essential elements of politics in
a free society. In our system, we work out our
regional differences, special interest conflicts and
competing value preferences principally in the form
of legislative solutions reached by our elected
representatives. Those solutions are often
imperfect, but we accept them rather than resort to
force and violent conflict.
Legislators
are not free to ignore constitutional rules or to
make up new ones as they work out conflicts. One of
those constitutional rules — the rule that two
different objects can’t be included in a single
piece of legislation — prohibits what the State
Senate, the incumbent governor, Tim Kaine, and his
immediate predecessor, Mark Warner, have done with
the budget bill during two of the last three
legislative sessions. They have proposed a tax
increase in the budget bill itself in an attempt to
force the House to accept the tax increase or watch
state government come to a halt without a budget.
There
is a deeper problem contributing to these budget
standoffs — the decline of political parties. The
two houses of the General Assembly are nominally
controlled by Republicans, but they stand for
fundamentally different political philosophies. The
grassroots and the volunteer leadership of the
Republican Party were emphatically opposed to the
position of those Senate Republicans who joined with
Senate Democrats to raise taxes in 2004 and
attempted to enact another massive tax hike in 2006.
The
Senate seems to reflect the position of Senator
Whipple, a Democrat. That is not a surprise since
the Republican leadership in the Senate has split
with conservative GOP senators and joined Democrats
in that chamber in support of tax hikes formally
opposed by the Republican Party of Virginia. The
House Republican Caucus opposed the tax hike
proposed by the Senate and refused to yield even
when the Senate seemed bent on shutting down state
government. Ultimately, the budget was enacted
without a tax increase.
Unless
this philosophical rift between the chambers is
resolved, Virginia’s reputation for fiscal
responsibility and good government will continue to
erode. We can’t afford to repeat this pattern of
legislative stalemate.
Virginians
have been slow to embrace the Responsible Political
Party Model, which contemplates enough internal
discipline for a party to pursue a common political
agenda. This reluctance comes with a cost. Voters
cannot effectively choose a policy direction when
the parties themselves are divided. And party
discipline and coherence will be difficult to
achieve until the party exercises effective control
over the process of nominating its candidates.
–
June 26, 2006
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