Statehouse One-Acts: He’s Just Glenn
anywhere else he'd be a ... boring rich white guy
Because I’m me, I just couldn’t close out the week without a little Virginia update.
This week, Old Dominion lawmakers returned to Richmond for what’s known as the “veto session,” which is when the legislative session reconvenes for one whole day to consider, accept, and/or reject the governor’s vetoes and amendments to the legislation and budget that passed earlier in the year.
The space between the end of the regular General Assembly session in March and this past Wednesday was … fraught.
GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin was pouty about not getting his Mojo Dojo Casa Arena so he could steal two professional sports teams from DC and bring them to the Commonwealth, and rather than sulk in solitude, he took his tantrum on the road.
In the back half of March, Youngkin undertook a statewide publicity tour, where he mostly just met with Republican faithful and bitched about how unfair Democrats were and how awful the state budget they passed was (he called it a “backward budget,” which, well, points for alliteration, I guess).
Virginia’s two-year spending plan – which passed with some GOP support, by the by, so it wasn’t some Dem wish list forced through on party-line votes – contained pretty much nothing of what Youngkin wanted, which included both his pet arena project and tax cuts for the wealthiest Virginians offset by a sales tax bump, which effectively amounted to a tax increase for the many many folks in the state’s lowest tax brackets.
Youngkin peppered his little tantrum tour with claims that the General Assembly’s budget plan amounted to a $2.6 billion tax hike over two years, conveniently failing to mention the fact that at least $1 billion of this would mostly be paid by big tech and other corporations, since the tax increase was levied against business purchases of digital products and services. Such a tax was originally Youngkin’s idea, actually, but he wanted it to only apply to individuals.
The governor also claimed that Democrats’ push to have the state rejoin the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) accounted for much of the rest of the supposed “tax hike.”
Youngkin appointees yeeted Virginia out of RGGI last summer, ignoring the many successes and benefits of the program in the short time the Commonwealth had been a member (since 2020), including hundreds of millions of dollars for flood preparedness and resilience planning [[glares in Hampton Roads]].
Youngkin coupled his attacks on the budget with a record 153 vetoes – vetoes that mostly targeted Democratic policy priorities including gun safety, raising the minimum wage, prescription drug affordability, reproductive rights protections, and establishing a commercial cannabis marketplace.
Fun fact! The previous gubernatorial veto record was 120 and was set by Terry McAuliffe over the course of his entire term, not in just a single year.
Democratic lawmakers clapped back with a budget PR tour of their own, raising the tension between the two branches of government in the weeks leading up to the April veto session.
Leaders like Sen. Louise Lucas castigated Youngkin’s hamfisted approach to budget negotiations, at one point telling reporters, “He is not very smart when it comes to politics. He thinks that he is the boss of all of us.”
… a boss that will be gone in a year and half, to boot, while most lawmakers will still be around.
On April 8, the governor unveiled a package of 233 proposed amendments to the two-year state budget plan approved by the General Assembly a month prior, essentially rewriting it and setting up a potential shit-showdown.
“Nothing says ‘I love you and let’s work together’ like 153 vetoes, 233 budget amendments and a three-week campaign about how the budget we passed was backwards,” Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell told WaPo.
Theoretically, lawmakers could have opted to (and seemed prepared to) reject all of Youngkin’s major changes and send their original budget plan back to him.
Youngkin could then have found himself in the position of potentially becoming the first Virginia governor to veto an entire budget – and potentially becoming the first Virginia governor to trigger a state government shutdown if a new plan didn’t get approved by the end of the fiscal year on June 30.
Ultimately, it seems as though Democrats took pity on Glenn.
Budget negotiations between the governor and legislative leadership finally commenced, and the Democrats who control the state House and Senate agreed to scrap the existing state budget proposal and “work toward a new budget document” by mid-May.
On one hand, this leaves barely a month and a half for additional negotiation and approval before the state’s drop-deadline of June 30 (providing the new budget proposal is finished by the expected date of May 13, which, well, I’m not holding my breath).
Ideally, additional negotiations would be minimal once the new budget proposal reaches completion; lawmakers have agreed to base the new agreement on their priorities in the already-approved budget but to also take “Youngkin’s priorities into account.”
… whatever that means
And given that Youngkin used his veto pen to shit all over pretty much every single Democratic policy priority this year, I’m not sure why they’d do a virtual lame duck any favors.
Remember, Virginia governors can’t serve consecutive terms. Youngkin will be riding his big pile of money into the sunset in a year and a half.
The next month and change will be an incredibly consequential time in Virginia politics – and will likely determine whether or not Youngkin leaves office as a middling partisan hack or as an abject failure.
Stay tuned!
Apropos of Youngkin …
Not-so-fun fact! In 2021, Virginia Democrats lost the state House majority by an excruciating 750 votes across just three districts. Meanwhile, 64,000 more votes were cast for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, who was at the top of the ticket that year, than for state legislative candidates.
If Democrats had gotten just 1% of the people who voted for McAuliffe to vote for their Democratic state legislative candidate, they would have kept the House majority (and maybe, just maybe, Youngkin would have had to figure out how to actually govern by now).
The above data comes courtesy of Sister District,* who also figured it would be useful to understand specifically which Democratic voters are rolling off their ballots, why, and what Dems can do to address the problem.
Via a partnership with Data for Progress, they’ve been working to collect research and data on the topic – data and findings they’ll be sharing via a virtual briefing on Monday, April 22, at 3 p.m. ET.
I’ll be discussing those findings in this space, of course, but why wait on me? You can join the briefing yourself by signing up for the Zoom link right here.
*a tremendously effective state lege-focused group with whom I’m doing some work these days
Anyway, thanks for hanging in, and stay rad.