So Virginia Democrats come now to that fabled fork in the road, that dividing place, that dividing time. Will they remain relevant? Depends on which fork they take.

The coming session of the General Assembly rushes in. What will the marquee issue be?

Not the new Speaker. Bill Howell comes in from dead center. He’d better bring a whip and a chair with him. Some of the kooks on the right will need some taming.

Not a governor still trying to find traction. Old news, sad to say.

Maybe some of the legislation? I doubt it. There will be effort made to re-write the highway funding formula, but wiser heads will prevail on that one. How about real tax reform? Get real.

The McDonnell-Hanger committee, charged with just that, veered pell-mell down the road of irresponsibility last week when they recommended repeal of Virginia’s estate tax, beginning, I believe, in 2005.

We’ve got a budget gap you could drive an aircraft carrier through and what do they do? Recommend a hundred million dollar tax break for millionaires -- while we’re forcing tuition increases from one end of the state to the other, closing DMV offices, and strapping local governments past the breaking point. Naw, don’t look for common sense in that corner.

Can Democrats find footing in any of this? They can, but only in dissent.

Patrick McSweeney, writing in a Sunday Daily Press column, says: "Both parties owe the voters a clear agenda. In our republican form of government, the choice of the policy direction the commonwealth should take is left to the electorate. That opportunity to choose is lost when the parties fail in their most important responsibility -- to articulate an agenda."

He is so dead right.

Politics is a putting up of choices. Virginia Democrats, relegated to historical minorities in both houses of the legislature, can only do that by dissenting -- not by singing a chorus of ‘me, too, me, too, me, too’, not by piling on, not by counting themselves part of the idiocy that not drives Virginia public policy.

There is honor in dissent, but not in silence. What is the agenda of the Democratic Party of Virginia? Hello! Is anybody there? Can silence resonate? Of course it can, especially the silence of the leadership.

Be sure of this: there can be no subsequent claims of confusion, no re-write of what happened, no reconsideration of what the choices were, no revisionist restatement of the facts. The choices facing Virginia Democrats in the coming budget debates are marked with exquisite clarity. Really, there is only one.

Virginia Democrats must dissent.

Is there one coming vote to judge this by? There is. Education.

Of course there are other issues, lots of them, that separate Democrats from Republicans, but, as a Democrat, the other issues don’t matter if you’re conflicted on K-12 funding. That is the separator, the arbiter that is the litmus vote. There can be no other.

Any elected Democrat in Virginia who supports cuts in K-12 education in this state should renounce his or her party membership and resign.