Parting shots

This is my final column for roanoke.com. The paper is changing the format of their online version, and canceling the weekly columns of people like me, Barnie Day and others. With that sense of finality in mind, I have some suggestions for political leaders in Virginia, and, more importantly, for those of us who are their employers. Since we are in a gubernatorial election year, and one in which all 100 members of the House of Delegates are up for election, it seems a good time to make suggestions.

First, it is long past the time when the commonwealth of Virginia should start registering voters with a party affiliation. This is the way most states operate, and there is always the option of registering “non-partisan” for those who do not wish to make their party identification public.

Political parties serve several purposes. The most important of these purposes is to honestly and consistently present political ideas and ideologies to voters. When a man or woman runs for office as a Republican, voters should be able to assume that the candidate has certain core beliefs, such as a preference for protecting the taxpayer from the government. The two major parties in Virginia state their basic beliefs on their respective web pages. (The Democrats do so at much, much greater length.)

Voters should have the right to confidently believe that if they vote for a Republican, they are voting for someone who shares the party’s creed. There is currently no such assurance in Virginia because anyone who cares to can call himself or herself a Republican. Indeed, if you are one of the hundreds of thousands of Virginians recently asked to sign a nominating petition for a statewide candidate, you may not be aware that there is nothing preventing Jerry Kilgore and Tim Kaine from attempting to get on the primary ballot for both political parties.

This is silly, and it does not have to be this way. If voters in Virginia had to register with a party affiliation, the parties would be able to restrict their nominating processes to those who have been registered Republicans or Democrats for a set number of years.

In addition, primaries in Virginia would be free of interference from members of the other party. Dedicated Democrats voted in large numbers in the 2000 Virginia Republican Presidential primary, and members of both parties have done so in other primaries. This practice, if it results in determining the nominee, denies voters their right to make informed decisions in the general election. Moreover, because voting in a Democrat or Republican primary is the only way to indicate a party preference in Virginia, both parties use the voter lists as mailing lists.

Put differently, if you vote in a Democrat primary, expect to receive political mail from Democrats for years. Party registration, if nothing else, would protect you from that!

My second suggestion is that the Senate of Virginia split its members into classes for election purposes, the way the U.S. Senate does. Half the senators should have to seek re-election in the gubernatorial year, and the other half two year later. As it is, all 40 senators run during the middle year of a governor’s term.

This means that for a year and a half, no one in the state Senate need pay the slightest attention to what the voters want. At the same time, all 100 delegates have to pay attention to their constituents all the time, since their re-election campaigns are always just around the corner.

This difference goes a long way toward explaining the bitter divide that has so often marked relations between House and Senate members in Richmond. So long as senators can ignore voters and delegates cannot, the two bodies will not work together as well as they should.

In addition, all 40 senators are isolated from statewide issues when they run for re-election. If half the Senate had to run on the same ticket as their party’s statewide ticket, those senators would have no choice but to run on statewide issues, such as taxes, education, Second Amendment rights, criminal justice, etc. As it is, senators are allowed to run essentially local, isolated campaigns. Such campaigns tend to revolve around who can bring home more pork from other senators’ taxpaying constituents. Such elections tend to go to the highest bidders and the biggest spenders.

Did you ever wonder why senators, of both parties, are so much more willing to raid your wallet than delegates? They are the ones who “need” the money to pay for the promises they made to get re-elected. It is past time to rein them in; splitting them up would be a good first start.

I know that there are those who believe that this suggestion is entirely unrealistic because they would both require the senators themselves to vote for a constitutional amendment that limits their power.

This brings me to my third suggestion: ballot initiatives!