February 29, 2004 - Leap Day

Dear Friends:

What a couple of weeks it's been! A lot of things have gone on since my last letter.

First: The Bad Bill

All bills and resolutions that are introduced in the House or Senate are first referred to one of the chamber's committees for consideration. In committee - theoretically at least - legislation is subjected to careful scrutiny. It is examined to see if it does what it purports to do, how it fits in with existing law, whether it would produce unintended consequences. The committee system is designed to act as a filter, making sure that a Bad Bill doesn't reach the floor of the House or Senate.

The system doesn't always work, and too often a remarkably Bad Bill ends up before the House. One such came up the week before last. It was a resolution that would ask the Congress to declare a list of matters, dealing with the First Amendment's protection of freedom of religion, off limits for lower Federal courts. They would be powerless to hear cases involving the National Motto, the Pledge of Allegiance (which the resolution quotes in full, just in case anybody has forgotten the wording), and the Ten Commandments.

What in the world is this all about? The National Motto and Pledge of Allegiance are just sideshows: the driving force behind this odd resolution is the case of a former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court named Roy Moore. Several years ago, in the dead of night, he decided to make a statement of his personal religious beliefs by installing a massive granite display of the Ten Commandments in the lobby of the State Supreme Court building. When a Federal court ruled that this violated the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and ordered it taken out, Roy Moore refused.

For his defiance of the rule of law, a state ethics panel removed Roy Moore from office. His actions brought notoriety - and some would say discredit - to the state of Alabama and gained him a great deal of publicity and mention as a future political candidate. (It also made him a poster boy for why Virginia should never follow Alabama's lead and choose its judges by popular election.)

The "Roy Moore Resolution" would reopen issues that were settled decades and centuries ago - issues about the Federal courts' authority to protect all Americans' rights. It's ironic that the resolution quotes the words of the Pledge of Allegiance, because its goal would be to subvert two of the Pledge's most important words: "One Nation." We are One Nation with one Constitution, one Bill of Rights, and one legal system that protects those rights, whether we live in Alabama or Virginia or Utah. The resolution would seek to undermine that principle.

This was a Bad Bill for more than one reason. In addition to its offensive content, it reinforces the unfair stereotype of Southern legislatures as frittering their time away on the parochial and peripheral. We have a lot of important issues to tackle - and as of today, less than two weeks left. With any luck, the genius of the bicameral legislative system will prove itself again, and this Bad Bill will get lost in the Senate.

Now, about OUR Judiciary:

My new assignment on the Committee for Courts of Justice gained me an invitation to breakfast with the Justices of the Virginia Supreme Court, just across the street from the Capitol. The six Justices (three men and three women) sit on one of the oldest continuous judicial bodies in the United States. The Charter of 1606 under which Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America, was established also established the court. In 1623, The Virginia House of Burgesses created a five-man court, called the Quarter Court because it met quarterly until 1661 - in that year it was renamed the General Court, because the judges didn't feel they needed to meet four times a year.

In 1850, a reform convention reorganized the judiciary by limiting the justices to twelve-year terms and providing for election by popular vote. The state was divided into five judicial sections and the five judicial candidates had to be at least 35 years old and live in the section he wished to represent.

After the Civil War, the Constitution of 1870 re-established the selection of judges by the General Assembly. In 1970, the name of the Court was changed to its present title of Supreme Court of Virginia.

Birds and Bees . . .

. . . came up in several contexts. We were presented with a bill that would have eliminated the requirement that couples applying for a marriage license receive a packet of information on a variety of important matters, including the role of folic acid in preventing birth disorders, birth defects, HIV/AIDS, and (the likely targets of the legislative hit man) birth control and family planning clinics. When a member from the other side of the aisle pointed out the value of getting this information into the hands of couples as they were about to marry, and suggested, "We've spent too much time this session voting for ignorance," the measure went down in flames.

Then Friday, for some reason, was Noah's Ark Day. In addition to birds -- migratory and nonmigratory waterfowl - and bees, on our calendar were Senate bills dealing with protection of vertebrate wildlife and sheep.

Now - On to the Budget

After weeks of anticipation, the House and Senate money committees came forward with their budget proposals this past week. The House budget writers, driven more by ideology than by the will to meet the Commonwealth's needs, came up with a budget that falls short on both sides of the ledger. On the revenue side, you'll recall, they tried to plug a $520 million hole in their bottom line with a last-minute proposal to roll back a series of sales tax exemptions that had been granted to various industries as economic development incentives over the years. The House sponsor acknowledged before a Senate committee that the figures on which the bill's revenue estimates were based weren't all that reliable, and we've probably heard the last of the proposal - leaving that $520 million gap in their budget just as big as it always was.

On the spending side, the House budget represents a significant retreat from the Governor's effort to address our needs in core services. It cuts $246 million from transportation and cuts state police by $35.6 million - equal to 450 officers a year. It also slashes state aid for local jails by $16.2 million, pushing the costs down on local governments and local taxpayers.

Funding for environmental protection - in a state that already ranks dead last in that category - is decreased by $30.2 million Higher education research takes a hit of $26.1 million, further eroding our competitive position in attracting and retaining our best faculty

The House budget also forces local governments to pick up the tab for important programs like those designed to serve limited English proficient (LEP) students. The Governor had proposed adding $19 million to meet the extra costs of educating these students. All that was eliminated by the House budget writers.

Not everything was spared the axe, of course. Several cultural facilities that just happen to be located in the majority leadership's home districts got lucky and got state funding. They're worthy enterprises, no doubt - but pork is pork, even if it's pork tenderloin.

And then there's the Horse Center.

The Virginia Horse Center is a 582-acre complex out in the western part of the state (in the district of the former Speaker and next to that of the majority caucus's senior member) that's designed to promote Virginia's equine industry. It was started in the 1980s with $5.5 million from the state treasury, and has been heavily subsidized with public funds since then.

Last year, with the state's aggregate contributions about to top $14 million, I raised objections to the Horse Center's request for an additional $1.2 million payout. The final budget cut last year's figure to $841,000 and put state subsidies on a phase-out track, to reach zero in 2008. The budget writers also instructed the Horse Center's foundation to come up with a business plan showing how it could achieve self-sufficiency.

The Horse Center did produce a business plan last November, but it didn't do what it was instructed to do. Rather than preparing for a phase-out of state subsidies, the plan assumed continuing subsidies of $1.2 million a year through the year 2021 - almost $20 million more! The document also disclosed that the Horse Center's bonds had been downgraded to "under investment grade" - I think that's called junk bond status - and that private donations, rather than increasing to supplant state funding, had virtually dried up.

The Horse Center is a great occasion for puns - I told the House it was time for the Center to stand on its own four hooves rather than looking for the Commonwealth to pony up additional funds - but it simply isn't an economically viable proposition. I urged the members to stop throwing bad money after good. While the Horse Center's money stayed in the budget, once again I'm pinning my hopes on bicameralism.

That may be a slim reed to lean on. There are huge differences - some $3.5 billion - between the House and Senate budgets, and many people are predicting that the gap cannot be bridged - certainly not in the next two weeks. One of our downstate colleagues told us last week, "I've been here 13 years, and it's the largest divide between the House and the Senate ever. It makes the Grand Canyon look like a storm-water gutter."

At the end of the week, the conferees - the handful of House and Senate members who are supposed to hash out the differences between the two proposals - were announced, and the Speaker's House appointees gave nobody reason for optimism that consensus would be close at hand. Rather than following the tradition of appointing senior members, he made sure that the most adamant anti-taxers - the Flat Earth Society - had places at the table.

Richmond is a lovely place in the spring . . .

Until next week,

Bob Brink