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Preston Bryant is a Republican who has represented Lynchburg and part of Amherst County in the Virginia House of Delgates since 1996.

Estranged bedfellows

By Preston Bryant
MARCH 22, 2004

The January, February, and March madness that has beset the 2004 General Assembly has certainly created a legislative quarter to remember. And that’s not necessarily a good thing.

That the past few months have been something of a long, strange ride – and that it’s getting longer and arguably stranger – can’t possibly be lost on even the most casual political observer. What folks have come traditionally to expect from Republicans and Democrats seems to have been turned inside out.

This is especially true when it comes to what the statewide business community has come to expect, where Republicans are the ones who not only keep taxes low but also stick up for those who create the jobs that keep Virginia’s increasingly sophisticated economy humming along, and Democrats sit in the wings and, at best, try to mimic the GOP’s business-friendliness, which often falls short given their ties to Big Labor.

The ’04 session, however, has been something of a final act in a long play of role-reversals, where Republicans have begun slipping in the eyes of Big Business and Democrats have been trying to capitalize on it. It all started, it seems, a few years ago.

Thinking back to the 2000 legislative session – that’s the one when the GOP came to dominate, for the first time ever, both the House of Delegates and Senate – the new majority sought to give Virginians a glimpse of the well-oiled governing machine they’d see henceforth. That year, House and Senate Republican leaders were working in such sync that they finished their 60-day session a day early, which included reaching easy agreement over a new two-year budget. As far as anyone knew, an early adjournment had never happened.

The following year, 2001, we saw the machine cough and sputter when its cogs and sprockets slipped from their grooves. The Republican House and Senate had differing opinions on what level of car-tax relief to give in the face of a slowing economy and an anemic state treasury. Unfortunate history was made when the General Assembly couldn’t agree on mid-point amendments to the biennial budget and left that constitutionally legislative task to the executive branch. That hiccup – let’s call it a burp – gave candidate Mark Warner the club he needed to beat up governing Republicans and slip into the governor’s office.

Among the most significant traditional GOP constituencies taking note of the party’s Warner-inflicted bruises was the business community, the very folks who’d helped incrementally push to power over the previous decade this new, conservative, pro-business Republican assembly majority. A few business heavyweights who’d long supported Republicans actually jumped to Warner during his campaign. And after seeing the GOP in uncharacteristically erratic control of the legislature for but two short years, others in the business community began scratching their heads.

But all of that head scratching was tempered by the deft way in which the majority party carved up assembly districts after the state’s decennial nose count. Redistricting was a smashing partisan success, and the GOP turned back every Democratic court challenge. It looked as though the legislature’s Republicans had gotten their act together. The ’03 session came and went, with Republicans trudging through tough budget balancing, reluctantly hiking some fees while also cutting more deeply than many felt comfortable. Warner signed off on the legislature’s actions.

All along, though, Warner continued to work the state’s CEO community. He gelled with some of the state’s biggest pinstripes as he schmoozed them in boardrooms throughout Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads and recruited them to back his ill-fated transportation referendums in those two regions. Despite the drubbing he – and they – took at the polls, where everyday Virginians rejected tax hikes to build roads, the relationships continued to hold. They still do.

Warner, as candidate and governor, generally has been able to do for the past four years something few Virginia Democrats could – make a legitimate play for backing by the statewide business community. He’s continually touted his private-sector executive management skills as being what’s saving state government from itself, not to mention from Republicans.

It’s arguably this political play – where a Democratic governor has tap-danced into the Republican business base – that has so knocked the GOP off balance that it’s led to assembly Republicans making other related missteps among both their rank-and-file and big-dollar constituencies.

In the ’04 legislative session, where there’s developed a fevered pitch between lower and upper chamber Republicans, the House GOP has struck a populist blow at Big Business by picking their pockets to generate enough revenue to balance its version of the budget without a general tax increase. Longtime, deep-pocketed supporters have called the House move ill-conceived, irresponsible, and a job-killer. The Senate GOP, on the other hand, has inflamed Republicans at the neighborhood level by pushing an eye-popping $4 billion increase in sales, income, gas, and other taxes and fees. While that once unimaginable $4 billion pilfering recently has been reduced to a mere $2.3 billion tax hike, it’s still the biggest boost in levies ever proposed in Virginia’s four centuries. Likewise, the Senate’s big tax increase has been called ill-conceived, irresponsible, and a job-killer.

In short, in this ongoing budget battle, House Republicans have played to the party’s grassroots at the expense of some in its business base, and Senate Republicans have played to some in the party’s business base at the expense of its rank-and-file. The result has been Republican mayhem.

This has become a political case of estranged bedfellows actually making the way for strange ones, where the GOP’s divisions within have allowed Warner to play footsies with their long-time business backers.

For Republicans’ sake, let’s hope this long, strange ride ends soon.

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