In Virginia, Democrats are in a rush. They won both houses of the state legislature last November for the first time in 26 years and don’t want to dawdle. They have only a month left to enact their agenda in 2020. It consists of cultural matters the national Democratic Party cares the most about: guns, abortion, gay and transgender issues, the Equal Rights Amendment, identity politics and race, the well-being of illegal immigrants. Economic issues are secondary — and troublesome.
The Democratic leaders in Richmond are from the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington. There’s not a conservative among them. Folks in the rest of the state used to say people from that region weren’t “real” Virginians. Most northerners still don’t qualify as genuine Virginians. But they’ve learned their way around the state capital and Virginia politics. And now, they’re in charge.
It’s their emphasis on cultural issues that, more than any other political difference, distinguishes them from Republicans. Republicans worry that illegal immigrants are scamming the welfare system. Democrats mull giving them driver’s licenses. Tom Davis, a Washington lawyer who spent 14 years as a House member from Virginia, says Republicans are the “tea party” and Democrats the “herbal tea party.”
When the Trump campaign took a Virginia poll months before the 2016 election, it found extreme hostility toward his candidacy, particularly in the northern enclave. A Trump aide called it “the swamp,” an extension of Washington, as indeed it is. So, the campaign decided to forget about an extravagant effort in Virginia and moved on. The poll was right. Donald Trump’s vote in northern Virginia hit record lows.
Today, the Democratic leaders would fit in ideologically in most northern or West Coast states. Eileen Filler-Corn of Fairfax County (population 1.1 million) is the first female speaker in the 400-year history of the House of Delegates. Charniele Herring of Alexandria is the first female and first black majority leader. Richard Saslaw of Fairfax is the Senate majority leader. And perish the thought that any of the three might be “Southern” Democrats. That political breed barely exists anymore.
I mention all of this because the four northern counties (Fairfax, Arlington, Loudoun, Prince William) and the city of Alexandria have become the power center of Virginia politics, and a Republican graveyard. Fairfax lost its lone GOP delegate in the 2019 election, Arlington and Alexandria have none, one survives in Loudoun, and one in Prince William. And things will surely get worse for Republicans when new lines based on the 2020 census are drawn. Expectations are that northern Virginia will get four new House of Delegates seats and one Senate seat at the expense of Republican strongholds in southwest and southside Virginia.
What have Democrats done so far in their triumphant status? They jumped on the ERA bandwagon, voting for the amendment and declaring Virginia the 38th state needed for ratification. Too bad they missed the deadline for adopting the amendment by 38 years. They relied on Speaker Nancy Pelosi “voting” to have the House kill the 1982 deadline, but there are other obstacles, including the U.S. Senate. And the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department has declared that the deadline cannot be erased. Chances are, ERA backers will have to start over from scratch.
Most measures, large or small, are decided late in Virginia’s 60-day legislative session. Halfway through, there’s “crossover.” It’s a wild and nerve-wracking event. Legislation introduced in the House was sent to the Senate and vice versa. The Senate filed 1,095 bills for the House to consider, the House 1,734 for the Senate, a tiring task for both chambers. Crossover didn’t wind up until nearly 1 a.m. What caused the flood of paperwork? Pent-up demand by Democrats to enact stacks of bills after having been deprived of the joy of legislating for so long.
Abortion and guns are their most controversial concerns. On these two issues, the wide gap between Republicans and Democrats in Richmond is the same as in Washington. Indeed, whatever Pelosi favors, Filler-Corn will too. Democrats want to wipe away as many restrictions on abortion as possible. Republicans seek limits as sweeping as a near-total ban on abortions, which the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling blocks. On guns, Democrats want more restrictions, including the outlawing of some guns and ammunition. Republicans embrace the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms and the court’s decision upholding that right as applying to individuals.
Given the opportunity power offers, Democrats are ambitious to accomplish big things. They’d make abortions free of restrictions imposed by Republicans, such as requiring an ultrasound and a 24-hour waiting period before an abortion. The most radical idea of Democrats is to allow so-called health professionals who are not doctors to perform abortions. According to the Washington Post, nurse practitioners and physician assistants would be authorized “to perform the procedure.”
And pro-choice Democrats have another role for Virginia as possibly the abortion capital of the upper South. At a hearing of the House Courts of Justice Committee, Tarina Keene, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia, spelled it out: “Due to the new conservative makeup of the Supreme Court, we can no longer rely on the court to protect our own rights and freedoms. If Roe is overturned, we need to be a safe haven in Virginia because West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina are preparing to outlaw abortion.”
The battle over abortion and guns brought Gov. Ralph Northam out of hiding. A year ago, the media and politicians insisted he resign after his medical school yearbook was revealed to have pictures of a man in blackface and another in Klan garb on his page. But he refused to step down. When Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax was said to have been accused of assault by two women, that meant Northam couldn’t resign and let Fairfax succeed him.
Northam is NARAL Pro-Choice’s favorite governor. He’s earned it. Northam supports abortion up to birth and talks as if it’s sometimes justified afterward. At the moment, guns are more important to him. The legislation he’s proposed has riled up gun owners, a reported 22,000 of whom staged a rally in Richmond. Twenty mostly rural counties have anointed themselves as gun-rights sanctuaries. And they’re serious about it. Northam has eight requirements for gun legislation, including a “red flag” law allowing authorities to seize guns from someone regarded as a threat. How many of the governor’s requirements will remain in the bill that passes is anybody’s guess.
Business, tax, and economic issues have received minimal attention, with one exception: Virginia’s right-to-work law. Democrats oppose right-to-work because unions do, and unions provide them with money, organizers, and campaign workers. Large businesses, on the other hand, love Virginia’s right-to-work law that protects workers from being forced to join a union as a condition of holding a job or being forced to pay union dues without joining.
With Democrats in full control in Richmond, Saslaw, the Senate majority leader, decided right-to-work was a ripe target. Saslaw was first elected to the Virginia legislature in 1979. Larry Sabato, the political guru at the University of Virginia, says that for years, Saslaw was seen as too liberal for his Fairfax district. More recently, he’s been accused of being not liberal enough. He had a difficult primary fight in 2019, narrowly beating Yasmine Taeb, who criticized him for, among other things, supporting the death penalty. He outspent her 6-to-1.
His punishment was the thrashing his right-to-work proposal took. A Democratic committee chairman asked the Department of Planning and the Budget for a fiscal impact report. Repeal of the right-to-work law would “result in the loss of new project announcements representing thousands of manufacturing and supply chain jobs,” and Virginia “would lose approximately $9-25 million in state general fund revenue per year … a loss of revenue that would grow over time.”
On top of that, Todd Haymore, the commerce and trade secretary for former Democratic Gov. Terry McAullife, wrote that already “competitor states are using the potential for a repeal or weakening of the right-to-work law against Virginia in business recruiting.” Those two blows quickly killed the notion of repeal in both legislative chambers.
A final question: Are Democrats swerving too far to the left? Davis believes they have. “I think they’ve overread their mandate,” he told me. Even before the new Democratic legislature took the field, a Mason-Dixon poll in mid-December showed Trump ahead of three Democrats in Virginia. He led Pete Buttigieg 47% to 45%, Bernie Sanders 51% to 45%, and Elizabeth Warren 48% to 44%, and trailed Joe Biden 49% to 45%. A Virginia Commonwealth University survey in early December found similar results.
Virginia has moved to the left over the last decade, but it’s not yet a solidly blue state. It wouldn’t take much to increase Trump’s vote in northern Virginia. The urban-versus-rural pitch that elected Northam in 2018 and the legislature last year may not work a third time. Republicans are dissatisfied. “Any economic success will be in spite of the new policies, not because of them,” Bill Howell, who retired in 2018 after 15 years as speaker, says. The right-to-work fiasco undermined any good intentions.
What if the legislature produces a backlash? We’ll know soon enough.
Fred Barnes is a Washington Examiner senior columnist.
