Columnist Bob Lewis notes that despite working in the middle of a busy, fast-paced, technologically advanced state, Virginia lawmakers stick to a legislative schedule “befitting the agrarian Virginia of the 19th century.” (Graham Moomaw/Virginia Mercury)
Virginia’s political class loves to beat its chest over its “part-time legislature,” doing the people’s bidding in the dead of winter each year and then sending its citizen lawmakers back to their homes long before the first daffodils bloom.
Yet here we are in the shank of June, one special session in the books and likely facing yet another legislative cattle call back to the Capitol in Richmond, this time to repair a snafu from a bungled budget amendment that restricts the eligibility for veterans’ dependents using college benefits they’ve been promised.
This isn’t about mistakes. People make them.
No, this is about a policymaking system rooted in Virginia’s distant, bucolic past when tobacco farming, textile milling and coal mining were the pillars of an economy in the commonwealth that was puny compared to today’s. It’s about a system that invites error and inefficiency.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it ‘‘’til the cows come home,” if I may borrow an aphorism almost as antiquated as those notions about the virtues of an abbreviated, amateur, pastoral General Assembly: Virginia, with the nation’s 12th largest population and its 13th largest gross domestic product, is a busy, fast-paced, technologically advanced state inextricably hardwired into the neighboring seat of national government. Its problems and the policy solutions they demand are commensurately intricate. Yet we adhere to a legislative schedule befitting the agrarian Virginia of the 19th century.
Ten states have full time legislatures, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Virginia’s legislature is among 26 that the NCSL classifies as “hybrid,” somewhere between those that essentially remain at work year-round and those with limited meeting schedules ranging from a few weeks to every other year. We pay our senators $18,000 and our delegates $17,640 per year plus $210 per diem, ranking Virginia in the bottom third nationally for legislative compensation.
It’s a very macho conceit that 140 people and their support staffs can, in just a couple of months, remedy the many pressing, evolving issues that require thorough research and analysis and thoughtful deliberation, instead of shoot-from-the-hip responses that seem easy but sometimes flop spectacularly when pressed into practice.
That said, any fair assessment has to conclude that the final work product is better than one might expect from such a system. In the 20 or so years I spent reporting on and analyzing the General Assembly from within, I was impressed at how well overworked committee staffs performed under the numbing stress of impossible deadlines, especially those who handled the budget.
The present dilemma arises from the whirlwind pace of time-stressed legislating paired with bipartisan misjudgment on the sensitive question of higher education benefits for families of those killed, injured, missing in action or held captive during military service.
More times than I can count, I was among a handful of journalists who stayed into the wee hours with the House and Senate money committee staffs as they guided a handful of bleary-eyed lawmakers in brokering a compromise on a new state budget. After a handshake sealed the deal, those wizards of money, math, policy and technology toiled through the dark to well after sunrise to put everything into final form, printing and collating 140 fat binders known as “half sheets” and putting them neatly on the desk of each legislator on the House and Senate floors. It’s one of the most amazing feats I have ever seen a team achieve.
The present dilemma arises from the whirlwind pace of time-stressed legislating paired with bipartisan misjudgment on the sensitive question of higher education benefits for families of those killed, injured, missing in action or held captive during military service.
The Mercury reported that costs of the Virginia Military Survivors & Dependents Education Program have, if plotted on a grid, spiked abruptly upward like a hockey stick over the past half-dozen years because of growing enrollment. The number of participants more than quadrupled — from 1,400 in 2019 to 6,400 last year — and commensurately bloated the state’s cost to nearly $65 million in the 2022-23 academic year, up 444% from the 2018-19 school year.
Lawmakers voiced alarm at the rapid cost increases. A stand-alone bill that would have moderated VMSDEP was introduced in this year’s regular General Assembly session but was converted into a study resolution. After they blew past the deadline for enacting the state budget by the scheduled regular session adjournment date this year for the seventh year in a row, they went into a special session to reach a compromise on the commonwealth’s two-year, $188 billion financial blueprint through June of 2026.
A closed-door conclave of senators and delegates slipped an amendment into their final version of the budget that imposes new VMSDEP eligibility rules. They limit benefits to undergraduate study and exclude graduate study such as medical or law school. They further restrict them to Virginia residents and compel participants to file an application for federal programs that assist with higher education costs based on income to mitigate VMSDEP expenses.
The compromise had the imprimatur of House and Senate budget negotiators — led by Democrats but including Republicans — and Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. What it didn’t have was any heads-up to (and certainly no input from) affected stakeholders — spouses and dependents of disabled or killed armed forces members. When the details became public days before the May 13 special floor sessions to enact the overdue budget, all hell broke loose, as it should have.
The optics are dismaying. Here is the government of Virginia, home to the largest number of active-duty military per capita of any state, sneaking in cuts to a program that aids the loved ones of those who paid a profound price — including the supreme price — for defending their country. True, the costs are climbing, but these ham-handed reductions to VMSDEP in the context of a $188 billion biennial budget fail the sniff test.
Did they really believe it would go unnoticed or, at worst, encounter only grudging acquiescence?
Was a lack of foresight from the loss of more than three centuries of collective legislative experience and hard-earned wisdom after a tsunami of 2023 retirements (14 delegates, six senators, including half a dozen with 20 or more years’ tenure) partly to blame?
It’s tough to fathom even a freshman legislator not recognizing a threat to VMSDEP as a hornet’s nest, and now that they’ve treated it like a piñata, stung policymakers want the limits rescinded. Legislative leaders agreed Thursday to return to the Capitol on the 28 — two days before the new state fiscal year starts and the 2025-26 biennial budget takes effect — to do that.
Initially, Democratic legislative leaders voiced misgivings about rushing back to Richmond to amend the newly passed budget, noting that current VMSDEP participants and new enrollees would not be affected by the change and thus remedial action could be deferred until January and the 2025 regular session.
Because the special session that convened May 13 to belatedly pass the budget was recessed rather than adjourned, there is no need to convene a second special session — something the General Assembly has required three times since 2018 to finish its business. There have been only eight years this century that Virginia’s General Assembly has not had at least one special session.
It’s time to drop the threadbare conceit that Virginia isn’t already being forced to make and revise policy throughout the year. Why not do it at a more deliberate, thoughtful pace instead of in fits and starts occasioned by a calendar for a time that predates indoor plumbing?
The post Mistakes happen. But Virginia’s hurried, anachronistic legislative schedule invites them. appeared first on Virginia Mercury.