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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.

Reality check

By Preston Bryant
MARCH 29, 2004

It’s not just far away observers who at times might perceive the state capitol as a fun house or hall of mirrors, where its goings-on can be thought a half step or so from reality. Sometimes, the delegates and senators themselves see it that way.

It’s a place where everyday life is reduced to words on paper, only to have men and women from different perspectives translate them back into reality so that their effects can be predicted. And, in practice, at least half of everybody must agree.

It’s a place where actions taken on the most innocuous matter can impact, for good or bad, at least one person and as many as seven million. And, in practice, you’re to try and pin it down.

It’s a place where definitions must be assigned to concepts yet born, where costs must be determined for expenses not known, and where parameters must be set for human actions only imagined.

It’s a place where sometimes life and death – literally – are being weighed, and it’s mere mortals doing it.

To say that time in the capitol can be as surreal and distorted as a Dali clock is to not put too fine a point on it. And to suggest that delegates and senators are never personally affected – or even at times a little wigged out – by it all is to not appreciate the human psyche’s vulnerabilities.

The dynamics swirling around the capitol the past several months, and especially the last two weeks, have been as strange as any time in modern political history. Friends and colleagues have crossed swords with each other over some issues so small that in any other year they’d never have registered one to another. Legislators, lately more than usual, have debated within themselves the interests of their districts against those of Virginia as a whole. They’ve found themselves pushed toward positions and votes they’d never had taken a year ago and couldn’t imagine taking in a hundred years.

Delegates and senators have found themselves ripped between their consciences and party duty. They’ve seen their votes converted, or perverted, to loyalty tests. They’ve found themselves having to conduct personal, political cost-benefit analyses on their very own words and deeds, where they know that, depending on the judgments of others, their careers may be accelerated or cut short.

And over the past few months, at most any day’s end, most any legislator asked must admit to having voted one way or another for reasons other than the heart’s dictate.

Let not the impression be given here that the House of Delegates and Senate are not honorable places and serving in them something less than a pinch-yourself privilege. Our assembly is nearly four centuries old. It’s the oldest, continuous democratic body in the western world. It’s withstood the test of an extraordinary amount of time, and it’s done so by virtue of Virginians’ ability to gauge integrity and elect men and women who in turn will honor the institution as much as those who sent them.

So imagine the heavy hearts when legislators failed – for the first time in the assembly’s nearly 400 years of success – to assemble and approve a budget to run the government of more than seven million people who depend on it.

And imagine even more the restlessness of many delegates and senators who, but for internal and external political influences, would’ve moved long ago to forge an artistic compromise.

When you boil it down, government is truly little more than the wise expenditure of citizens’ tax dollars, and political debate is little more than defining what wise means. At present, the process that has served Virginia so well for so long has ground to a halt because otherwise well-intentioned legislators have allowed the surreal here-and-now to forsake our worthy past and obscure the good view ahead.

The process as it now stands also has gouged many legislators’ souls more than it would have under what usually passes for normal circumstances. Neither politics nor legislating are easy games, and no one plays them without expecting bare-knuckled brawls and damned-if-you-do-or-don’t decisions.

There are two realities now before us. First, the short-sighted are damaging a legislative institution that thousands before them have helped build and guard. And, second, every day that passes without an adopted state budget compounds a historic precedent that’s so sadly been set and exacts uncertainty on all who depend on it.

It’s time for a reality check, and it’s time for cooler heads to prevail

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