Bacon's Rebellion

Creigh Deeds had a pretty good weekend. He picked up 23 votes and now trails Bob McDonnell by 322 votes.

The canvassing continues. Every nook and cranny is being checked because you never know where a stray vote might be hiding.

According to Kiran Krishnamurthy at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Medicaid and transportation are the top legislative priorities in the House of Delegates.

House Speaker William J. Howell, R-Stafford, says that Medicaid, which accounts for 12 percent of the General Fund budget, needs a top-to-bottom reform just like welfare did. Krishnamurthy quotes Howell as follows:

Lawmakers “kind of blew up the [welfare] model and started over, and I really think we have to take a look at Medicaid in that same kind of sense,” he said, mentioning health savings accounts and HMOs for Medicaid participants as possible avenues.

On the transportation side, Howell says he will have “a very full package,” with an emphasis on generating revenue through tolls.

I hinted in an earlier Road to Ruin posting, and I’m elaborating on the idea here, that the election of Tim Kaine is scrambling the political calculus of the transportation debate. Sen. Finance Chair John Chichester, the seeming lord and ruler of the state Senate, may lose the power to control that body’s deliberations to the extent that he did under the Warner administration. That, in turn, may make it much tougher to push through a transportation-related tax hike in the 2006 General Assembly.

I have next-to-no knowledge about the inner workings of that body. I’m taking my cue from Bob Burke’s description of last week’s hearing by the Statewide Transportation Analysis and Recommendation Task Force. As Burke wrote:

Sen. Edd Houck, D-Spotsylvania, objected in the opening minutes of the START meeting that too little time was set aside to talk about transit and land-use issues. Those topics “always seem to be a footnote. It’s always, ‘Let’s spend some time talking about money, and if there’s a spot at the end… maybe we can talk about land use.”

Hmmm. Let’s see…. A Democrat has elevated land use to a central issue in Senate deliberations on transportation. Tim Kaine made land use a centerpiece of his transportation policy during the campaign. Could there be a connection? Of course there is!

During the Warner administration, Chichester could always count on support from the Senate Democrats in squelching the Senate’s few low-tax conservatives because Chichester and the Democrats were aligned with Gov. Mark Warner, and against the conservatives, on the need for tax increases. But Tim Kaine has declared that he won’t support a tax hike for transportation until passage of a Constitutional amendment protecting it from fiscal raids by the legislature. He also wants to address the dysfunctional pattern of land use, an underlying cause of traffic congestion.

Whatever the Senate Democrats’ views on taxes, they will feel a strong partisan pull to back a Democratic governor. And if Tim Kaine is against new taxes, at least for now, they may be too. Although Senate Dems may have little philosophically in common with the low-tax Republicans, they may decide to make common cause tactically to turn back a Chichester bid to raise some $1 billion to $2 billion a year in new revenue.

The state Senate has 24 Republicans and 16 Democrats. If the Dems line up solidly behind Kaine, all it takes is five conservative Republicans to block any tax-hike legislation coming out of the Senate. Chichester may be able to ram his preferred legislation through the chamber, but there’s a good chance that he’ll have to fight like hell to do it. Such a prospect may force him to be more bending in budget negotiations with the House than he has been in past years.

In an article written Sunday, Tyler Whitley acknowledged the intense debate between moderates and conservatives in Virginia’s Republican Party over why Jerry Kilgore lost the gubernatorial election. Quoting an “angry e-mail” by campaign manager Ken Hutcheson — calling Phil Rodokanakis with the Virginia Club for Growth a “spineless, gutless coward” — he also alluded to “a column written by Rodokanakis” that accused Hutcheson of running an unprincipled campaign.

(An aside: Note that Phil’s column appeared in the Bacon’s Rebellion e-zine, the Bacon’s Rebellion blog published Hutcheson’s letter, and much of the internal GOP debate has taken place on this blog. But Whitley did not see fit to mention us, as if the entire controversey had occurred in a vacuum. From now on, we are adopting an editorial policy of not attributing any of Whitley’s writings to a particular media outlet. He is simply “a reporter” who writes “articles.” As a courtesy to our readers, however, we will link to the source material.)

Most of the Whitley article is a rehash to anyone who has been following the debate on this blog, but he does quote Ken Hutcheson and former Gov. Jim Gilmore as making an interesting point — a point that I had not sufficiently appreciated when I criticized the Kilgore campaign the day after the election for having failed to make an issue of the “Warner/Kaine” tax increase. “Without criticizing Kilgore, [Gilmore] said the candidate ‘was in a sense a victim’ of the Republican legislators who voted for the tax increase in 2004. ‘He could have made his position [against taxes] clearer, but he was trying to hold together a party with different viewpoints.’”

Whitley also quotes Hutcheson as follows: “To make taxes the centerpiece of our campaign would draw attention to the fact that Mark Warner had peeled away a lot of Republicans, not only in the legislature, but all across Virginia. It would have been difficult for us to have maintained a good deal of Republican support and working relationships because so many colleagues and friends had supported it.” (The problem was especially acute for Hutcheson, who was close to Senate Finance Chair John Chichester, R-Northumberland, a co-architect of the tax increase.)

Indeed, Kilgore found himself between a rock and a hard place. He was put in the position of papering over a horrendous divide inside the Republican Party. Those divisions were not of his making. Indeed, there is no indication that the divisions are likely to fade any time soon. The same chasm could well confront the next Republican to run for governor four years from now.

A few new menu items appear on the pundit table today, along with the standard fare.

Bob Gibson of the Daily Progress gives us the old “special,” a warmed-over discussion of anti-tax Republicans plotting their comeback. The Jim Gilmore is especially spicy.

If you don’t mind a few toxins, Jeff Schapiro of the Richmond Times-Dispatch serves up sliced Bill Bolling. Schapiro uses every knife in the drawer on the Lieutenant Governor-elect’s prospects of leading the Senate, including this treat:

The electorate’s preference for responsible, workable ideas may force Bolling to reconsider his views that taxes are terrible; that government is greedy; that guns are good; that abortion is an abomination.

Norm Leahy has a more complete review of this item.

Fortunately, there is something different to choose from.

Melanie Scarborough of the Washington Post goes on a tear about government spending, a dish she serves up better than just about anybody writing today:

On Wednesday Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) announced that the Virginia Department of Social Services had been awarded a $10.7 million bonus from the federal government for exceptional performance in collecting child-support payments. This was treated as good news.

Hardly anyone asked what, if anything, can be gained by giving additional money to an agency that already is adequately funded. No one questioned the purpose of spending millions of taxpayer dollars on rewarding a bureaucracy. (The money goes to the department, not to individual employees.) And apparently no one raised the most obvious issue of all: When children in Virginia are owed a collective $2.2 billion in child support, wouldn’t the money be better spent on their support than on the government’s?

Talk about taking on conventional cooking ….

Also in the Post, Marc Fisher remembers Kerry Donley, the Democratic star who left the political rat race of being mayor for the Athletic Director’s job at T. C. Williams High School in Alexandria:

What got to me was the grind of local government,” he says. “You’re going from 7:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. six, seven days a week. You miss seeing your family and watching your kids grow up.”

Donley still works long hours, but going to volleyball games isn’t the same kind of pressure as fielding calls from taxpayers riled up about police protection, potholes or parking.

Donley is just undergoing a mid-life crisis, so never fear. He says, “I’d like to run for office again.”

Sixth District Richmond City Councilwoman Ellen Robertson, writing in the Times-Dispatch, demands that “affordable housing and inclusionary zoning” get their rightful place on the menu. Trouble is, she’s short on specific ingredients and long on assuming the worst about those who don’t agree with her:

Since I recently introduced legislation to promote affordable housing via inclusionary zoning and to spark conversation about Richmond’s current housing policy or lack thereof, a firestorm of comments has ensued. Those comments range from the dismissive “do we really need this?” to the excusatory “well-to-do people don’t want to live near the working poor” to the status-quo-hugging “build more and improve existing public housing,” further illustrating a lack of understanding of this concept, as well as a deep-seated fear of constructive change.

Finally, it’s a good thing dogs aren’t allowed into restaurants. Kerry Doughterty of the Virginian-Pilot has had it with pit bulls. Sen. Edward Houck (D, Spotsylvania) is planning to “head back to the General Assembly next year with a bill that would stiffen criminal penalties for the owners of dangerous dogs.” That could end up as one of the more contentious issues in teh 2006 General Assembly.

The third meeting of the Senate’s START committee was handicapped by having to follow 24 hours of the Senate Finance Committee’s annual retreat at the Radisson on the Hampton waterfront. The senators and many observers were pretty wonked and zonked out by 1 p.m. Friday when the joint senator and citizen panel gathered, and it started bleeding senators almost immediately. Here’s the take from the Daily Press.

There were no observers from the House, which totally ignored transportation during it’s Appropriations Committee retreat earlier last week in Loudoun County. They brought the committee to Lansdowne in heart of commuter hell and within a stone’s throw of classic public-private projects and left transportation off the agenda for the second year in a row. A reporter who had been there told me the excuse was: tranportation isn’t a General Fund program. (I thought that was Chichester’s position.)

But there were two key guests at START from Governor-elect Kaine’s transition staff, Larry Roberts and Brian Shepherd. Both said nothing and kept admirable poker faces during the discussion (when they didn’t rush out to take cell calls), but they were there until the end.

What they listened to was a detailed discussion of a document on “Issues and Principles for Resolution.” It was like a diplomatic meeting where first you set the agenda, but just by setting the agenda you make key decisions. The document was created by facilitator Mark Rubin, who conducted phone interviews with all the group members and compiled the consensus. (Note to Bacon: Read the sections on land use and VDOT reform closely.) He must have done a good job because there wasn’t much debate.

But there was some. They struck the income tax off the list. Tim Robertson from Virginia Beach, son of the evangelist and a major Hampton Roads business leader, stressed how many voters do expect some of the surplus funds to be used and may balk if they are not. Former State Senator Wiley Mitchell probably stirred up a lobbying storm with his comments about eliminating sales tax exemptions (expect more dark suits at the next meeting.)

You can read the “Issues and Principles” document before the changes adopted Friday at the Senate Finance website. As before, not all Windows-based software can access it.

You can find the presentations for the whole Senate Finance Committee retreat here. Those of you who usually prefer the House’s point of view on issues should take the time to download and read these reports (if you can tear yourself away from the Ken and Phil Saga.) The briefing book that senators get out of this meeting gives them quite an advantage — it is solid gold.

What if the state gas tax was tied to the dollar, not to the gallon? I’ve heard that this is a proposal being considered for introduction in the 2006 General Assembly.

The gas tax is currently 17.5 cents on the gallon. If it was tied to the dollar, it would roughly be a wash at 9% if gas was around $2/gallon retail price. It’s a confusing enough change, though, that it would tie tax increase and anti-tax advocates in knots arguing when and if taxes had been increased. When gas prices increased, it would hit hardest, the opposite of what we presume the average consumer would want. Still, it could be part of some grand compromise on a transportation fund lockbox.

As a practical matter, though, I wonder if it would be doable without significant investment by gasoline outlets. They have some clout with the General Assembly. It’s been a while since I worked with petroleum dispensing equipment–could current dispensing equipment be easily modified to calculate the change? Posted gas prices would look lower than they do currently because they couldn’t include the tax.

If anyone knows anything about this idea or the practicality of it, I’d hope they hit the comments section.

The SBE is still at it, with their latest AG update minutes ago, at 4:47. McDonnell’s lead remains unchanged at 345, but a write-in vote was discovered, raising the total of write-ins from 1800 to 1801.

Count on me to keep you abreast of the latest vote swings and on the comments section for news of possible skullduggery (or is it just innocent reporting?).

The SBE has updated the AG vote totals twice today, resulting in a Bob McDonnell lead of 345 votes over Creigh Deeds as of 12:42. For those of you scoring at home, that’s a four vote net pick-up for Mr. McDonnell since yesterday afternoon.

Since I noted the large number of write-in votes in this race early this week, the write-in totals have risen from 1500 to 1800. Perhaps “none of the above” should be offered transition office space, too.

The Virginia gubernatorial race continues to reveberate, used by pundits far and wide to prove or illustrate their points.

The latest is Michael Kinsley, late of “Crossfire,” Slate, the LA Times, and other assorted outlets. Kinsley is great at exposing the absurdity of some political positions, most famously for declaring a “gaffe” to be when a politician “tells the truth.” Today, in his Washington Post column, he takes on the so-called abortion debate in this country, citing the Virginia gubernatorial candidates:

What passes for an abortion debate is a jewel of the political hack’s art: a big issue that is exploited without being discussed. In the Virginia governor’s race this year, both candidates said they were morally opposed to abortion, and both accused the other of falsely accusing him of intending to act on this moral belief, which both of them denied. And both of them, in this last particular, were probably telling the truth.

Newspaper prints editorial. Readers react. Newspaper prints a sample of the reactions in their letters to the editor section. Process starts over.

At the Daily Press, however, some respondents reflect views so noxious that the editorial board can’t just print them and let go.

Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform and dabbler in Virginia politics, is one who apparently holds views so noxious that they cannot be left unanswered.

Today, the DP printed a response from Norquist to their editorial of November 12th. But they also printed an editorial criticizing Norquist’s views as expressed in the letter.

I hold no brief for Grover Norquist (I love that cliche; I don’t know as I have ever “held” a “brief” for anybody). However, I find it a sign of almost pathological intolerance toward cutting taxes that the DP editorialists find it necessary to slam Norquist’s response on the same day it appears. Do they have so much contempt for their readers that they can’t let them decide for themselves between two opposing views?

Earlier this week, I received an email message from Ken Hutcheson, Jerry Kilgore’s campaign manager (see here). Hutch’s diatribe was in response to my column, “Winning On Principles,” that was published in Bacons Rebellion this week.

Hutch’s email vent speaks for itself. Nonetheless, I thought that I should give this young lad some sage advice, lest he finds himself unemployable even by the RINOs. It’s too bad that Hutch didn’t have a meltdown earlier in the campaign cycle; perhaps, Jerry Kilgore would have then listened to those of us who repeatedly asked him to put some mature handlers at the helm of the campaign.

Dear Ken:

Thank you so much for your nice and thoughtful message.

Your message proved exactly what a number of conservatives said all along about you and the Kilgore campaign: You simply don’t posses the maturity or political acumen to head any campaign, never mind a statewide initiative. Perhaps, your message to me has finally opened Jerry’s eyes…

You ask who cares about my columns. Well, the answer is obvious—you do! My writings couldn’t generate so much passion in anyone if they are irrelevant.

If you haven’t figured out by now that email messages are not the way to vent anger, then you are more hopeless than I originally thought. Let me spell it out for you: Email messages can be easily circulated! In the future I recommend you don’t use emails to air your diatribes. If you continue, even your RINO patrons may have second thoughts about engaging your services again.

________________________
Phillip Rodokanakis
President
Virginia Club for Growth
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.virginiaclubforgrowth.org

Bob McDonnell has reversed Creigh Deeds’ inexorable chipping away at his lead in the AG’s race.

McDonnell has gained one vote since the last SBE update. He now leads by 351 votes.

Update: As noted by a commentor, SBE has updated again and Deeds has restarted his pick-up. McDonnell now only leads by 341 votes.

Giving some heft to the word “trust” in Virginia’s “Transportation Trust Fund” is back on the front burner with Governor-elect Kaine’s transportation town meetings. Here is a column I wrote for Bacon’s Rebellion about a year ago on the topic for a bit of background.

It became a high priority for many in the business community after the 2002 failed referendum votes, and as the Virginia Chamber’s lobbyist I spent three sessions working with others to try to coax it out of Senate Finance. (We got it out of Senate Privileges and Elections once, for a couple of glorious hours, then it was re-referred to Finance to die.) I think I stood up once or twice in Finance to speak for Kaine’s amendment version (and if I didn’t, let’s tell him I did!) But there was never any support from the Warner Administration. Now there will be from the Kaine Administration (as there would have been from a Kilgore Administration, I’m sure.)

There are problems with this idea. The financial community hates to see states substantially earmark funds, reducing flexibility in hard times. And there can be too many earmarks — but Virginia is hardly there. We have constitutional directives that lottery profits go to education and that criminal fines go to the Literary Fund. The “Rainy-Day” Revenue Reserve is constitutional, meaning the General Assembly can’t override it. This would be the largest protected pot of money, but if you read the previous proposals, there are safety valves built in.

Good to see our intrepid (Update: Oops! See Steve’s comment) Bacon’s Rebellion colleague Steve Haner providing Chris Jenkins of the Washington Post some good quote at last night’s Gov-elect Kaine transportation meeting in Roanoke:

“He’s going to hear more songs than a Broadway musical,” said Steve Haner, the lobbyist for the Virginia Chamber of Commerce and a spokesman for the advocacy group Virginians for Better Transportation. “There remains a lot of debate, a lot of discussion and a lot of disagreement on these things, and I suspect he will get them all on this issue.”

“He isn’t giving any indication of which way he wants to go on any of this,” Haner added. “I think it’s going to be wide open. I’m not expecting any deep insights.”

I may be in the minority here, but I am still baffled why we had an election campaign with transportation as a top issue. Why didn’t Kilgore and Potts think to just promise statewide meetings, instead of promising to complete specific projects or raise taxes? The genius of Kaine is becoming apparent.