The imperfect perfect

It’s true that politicians can get wrapped around the axles of their own philosophies. They can paint themselves into no-way-out corners when trying to please everyone (yet no one) or attempting to walk the high and shaky wire stretched between deeply held beliefs and practical governing.

It’s a phenomenon that’s found in everyday politics, whether the issue at hand is “responsible” taxation (you decide) or government’s general role in individuals’ lives. These kinds of dilemmas are forever being presented to governors and legislators alike, and they usually come in the debatable form of too much vs. too little and the more specific and blunt one of right vs. wrong.

And for those whose job it is to make clear-cut decisions in a world of government that revolves almost equally around both theory and practicality, the decision-making process is murky and critical and perilous all at once.

The great Ronald Reagan discovered this. In 1966, he campaigned for governor of California as an ardent anti-taxer. He beat the Democratic incumbent Edmund G. “Pat” Brown and then found a $200 million budget shortfall upon taking office. The anti-taxer had a practical need to raise taxes by about $1 billion -- and he did within a few shorts weeks of his inauguration.

Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, a Democrat, found himself in a similar position when, despite no-tax-increase promises on the 2001 campaign trail, he had to face just after taking office a number of twisted bookkeeping maneuvers left him by his Republican predecessor that made balancing the state’s books -- especially during a national economic slump -- especially difficult. A couple of years after taking office, he proposed raising taxes.

And just this year, many in the General Assembly also found themselves forced to tread carefully between their low-tax beliefs and the need to govern practically. In the end, there was a smartly fashioned tax-reform compromise that’s a slight tax cut for many and a wash for most all others and which also allows that state to pay some long overdue bills.

These are just a few modern cases where pols have had to make extremely difficult decisions. But there’s certainly nothing new about these kinds of damned-if-you-do-or-don’t political and governing situations. They’ve been around since our nation’s founding.

There’s no greater example than slavery, an institution as wrong as wrong can be but which three centuries ago was so embedded in and integral to the new nation’s economic survival -- especially in the South -- that no “easy” exit from it existed. Indeed, the way our founding fathers handled the issue led to more than 175 years of fallout.

Virginia played a central role in the earliest slavery debates -- precisely because slavery played such a central role in Virginia. When the U.S. Constitution was drafted in 1787 and ultimately ratified a year later, it contained a specific provision prohibiting any state from abolishing the importation of slaves until after 1808. The whole issue of slavery had been a major divide between the many distinguished gentlemen assembled in Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention, with many Northern delegates wanting to end the practice immediately and many Southern delegates wanting to protect the backbone of their economy. The split threatened to doom the whole effort to form a constitution and set the new nation’s governing structure into place. The 20-year moratorium defined by the 1808 provision -- constitutionally prohibiting Congress from doing away with slavery -- was a compromise, allowing the degrading practice to continue a while longer for those to whom it was economically important but giving anti-slavery forces belief that the horrendous situation would indeed see its end.

The Virginians present at the convention, especially James Madison, were torn. Geographically they were in the middle of the New England vs. Deep South debate, and philosophically and morally they were, too. The Virginians were part of the so-called Upper South, and their emotions were tugged by Northern abolitionists’ arguments, but the pro-slavery politics of their constituents was strong and the Virginia economy was too dependent on the considerable slave population deployed to keep its agricultural trade strong.

Madison had severe misgivings about the institution of slavery. George Mason did, too. But as the 1790 Census would soon show, the Old Dominion at the time of the Constitutional Convention was home to nearly 300,000 slaves, making up about 40 percent of the state’s total population of nearly 750,000, and the economic impact of such couldn’t be discounted. To boot, the Virginians, especially Patrick Henry, were generally loath to cede states’ “commercial” trade authority to the prospect of a possible centralized federal government, which in itself was a matter also at the heart of the convention’s deliberations.

If our founding fathers, especially the Virginians whose divided hearts were obvious to their fellow Philadelphia conventioneers, had known that their relative inaction on the slavery issue would lead to more than a century-and-a-half of extreme racial strife -- including a bloody civil war that’d nearly destroy the nation they’d risked all to found -- it’s likely they’d have given greater thought to the 1808 provision. Arguably, it wasn’t until the 1964 Civil Rights Act that we saw disappear the legal inequalities that they’d hoped to see die away soon after the expiration that late-18th century 20-year moratorium put on congressional actions.

There’s probably no other debate in our nation’s history that we now know to have been so critical. The slavery debate -- and “compromise” -- that was so much at the center of the 1787 Constitutional Convention serves as the perhaps best example of policymakers struggling to find a middle ground only to miss by a wide mark what hindsight shows to have been the right call. It demonstrates how lawmakers work to navigate the choppy and muddy waters that often swirl around their decision-making processes, sometimes navigating them well, sometimes not so well.

What’s lost on most of the electorate (centuries ago as well as today) is the very nature of legislative debate and how decisions are made. It’s politics. It’s horse-trading. It’s a numbers game. It’s where favors are granted and chits are created. It’s a system that’s imperfect, imprecise, and often impractical.

But it’s also an oddly artistic one. It’s one where chaos gets corralled, wrongs get righted, moderation eventually prevails, and a greater good is achieved for the greater number.

The Virginia legislature over its nearly four centuries of existence has succeeded wildly. It’s a body whose early members helped found a new nation, despite making a few missteps along the way. It’s one whose mid-20th century members made grievous civil rights errors that eventually were corrected. And it’s one whose future lawmakers likewise will stumble only to have their successors make things right. The same can be said for the U.S. Congress.

The system, writ large, is designed to thrive and grow from its inherent push-pull tensions. It acknowledges the good, exposes the bad. It disallows prolonged acts of extreme philosophical wanderings.

There’s an imperfect perfection about our government and the way the forces within it work. The same founding fathers who goofed in handling the slavery issue while debating the very form our government would take succeeded beyond all knowing in establishing a government that would correct -- in time -- that very goof. That’s the beauty of it all.

It’s this flexible, ever-growing, forever self-correcting system of government, which for a couple of hundred years has been extolled and mimicked the world over. It should be celebrated as we all begin looking back at Jamestown’s founding and all that flowed from it. After all, at its heart is the handiwork of a handful of extraordinary Virginians.