Michael Shear at the WaPo adds some interesting perspective to the taxes-and-transportation debate.

For Howell, the spat is like a legislative version of Mad Libs, a children’s game in which sentences have blanks that players fill in with random nouns, verbs and adjectives to create silly stories. Replace “transportation taxes” with “Medicaid” in two years, and the Senate could be pushing for higher taxes once again. Or change it to “pre-kindergarten,” and Kaine could be boxing in the House on the issue of money for education.

Two years ago, when Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) was pushing for higher taxes, House Republicans were told that the increase was a once-in-a-lifetime necessity to avoid a budget crisis. More than 17 agreed and voted with the Senate to increase
taxes.

Now, many of those same people are joining Howell in being offended by the Senate’s belief that the House will always be blamed for these standoffs.

Shear cites the case of Del. S. Chris Jones, R-Suffolk, one of the Republicans who defected in 2004 to pass the Warner tax increase. In an op-ed piece in the Virginian-Pilot, Jones argued that the Kaine and the Senate are flouting decades of tradition: “By placing their tax hikes directly in the budget, despite not having been able to pass those increases through legislation, the Governor and the Senate guaranteed the current standoff.”

Among the delegates who voted with Warner in 2004, at least five others have written similar pieces for their local newspapers, Shear says.