Early Sunday morning, weary budget conferees from the Democrat-controlled Virginia state Senate and the Republican-controlled House of Delegates agreed to lop off an unprecedented $2.3 billion in spending to balance the state’s two-year, $70 billion-plus budget.
During the just-ended session, lawmakers also passed 80 percent of Gov. Bob McDonnell’s legislative agenda, honoring his campaign promise to not raise taxes.
“Modest victories,” The Washington Post sniffed. (When former Gov. Mark Warnergot a similar bipartisan agreement for a tax increase, The Post and most of the national media hailed him as a political genius).
But The Post was inadvertently right.Cutting $2.3 billion from a budget that has more than doubled since 1998 — increasing twice as fast as needed to keep up with population growth and inflation — is a modest achievement. If Richmond had been a better stewards of taxpayers’ money all along, it wouldn’t be in this predicament in the first place.
Thanking legislators for their efforts, McDonnell refused to sugarcoat the political pain of rolling back a decade of overspending to merely 2006 levels, which he correctly pointed out was necessitated by a precipitous drop in state revenue. Unlike Washington, states can’t print money, so something has to go when revenue doesn’t match what lawmakers wants to spend.
Under former Democratic Govs. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, what went was money out of Virginians’ wallets in the form of historic tax increases that the Republican-controlled House of Delegates acquiesced to after a vicious media campaign accusing them of not caring enough about (fill in the blank with any victim group of your choosing).
Perhaps it was the Republican sweep of all three statewide offices last November that convinced Senate Democrats that it would not be a good idea to oppose Bob “Jobs” McDonnell, whose laserlike focus on the economy stood in marked contrast to another chief executive across the Potomac River who carried the same state just a year before.
Instead of being at each other’s throats, Democrats and Republicans in the oldest continuous legislative body in the Western Hemisphere worked together to close the largest budget deficit in Virginia’s history. They also passed all three of the governor’s top priorities, including a $50 million increase in economic development and tax credits for job creation.
What the new budget does not contain is the old governor’s proposal for a 17 percent statewide income tax, which even Democrats conceded was inadvisable during a recession. The cuts basically gutted what little remained of Kaine’s paper-thin legacy.
Yet media criticism of McDonnell was surprisingly muted compared with years past, when partisans of both parties fought like Michael Vick’s pit bulls — not over whether they should, but how much they would, expand state government.
This time, it was different. After a decadelong party, the revelers in Richmond watched the sun rise and suddenly realized they had driven themselves — and their constituents — right into a $4.2 billion ditch. Which, of course, is exactly what they did.
Meanwhile, over the river in Washington, even though President Obama’s party controls both houses of Congress, he still hasn’t been able to get his major domestic initiatives — including union card check, cap and trade, and health care reform — over the finish line.
It’s not that McDonnell is a better politician. He has a better agenda.
Barbara F. Hollingsworth is The Examiner’s local opinion editor.
