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During the one-day reconvened General Assembly session in which legislators consider gubernatorial amendments and vetoes, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Democratic legislative leaders said out loud the part we knew all along — it was finally time to compromise.
Perhaps we should rejoice that the realization sank in late instead of too late to meet the June 30 deadline for finalizing a new budget to direct state government spending for the next two fiscal years.
Compromise was the only way this would ever be resolved.
With a legislature this closely divided — Democrats hold 21 of the 40 Senate seats and 51 of the 100 House of Delegates seats — and the governor’s office in GOP hands, there was no way one side would impose its will on the other. That should have been clear to senior policymakers on both sides.
Now, Republicans and Democrats have squandered four months on partisan Kabuki theater and less than two months remain to finalize a new budget by the start of the 2025-26 fiscal biennium, which goes into effect at midnight July 1.
Thankfully, they aren’t starting from scratch. They haven’t sat idle in the five months since late December when Youngkin delivered the aspirational first draft of the only budget he will originate and largely execute during his four-year term.
As much as one can forecast the economy for the next two years, the handful of people who will actually assemble the budget behind closed doors know the best current revenue and cost estimates. Each side already has a sense of which priorities the other side will negotiate and which they consider inviolable.
As I told Richmond Times-Dispatch reporters Dave Ress and Michael Martz, however, both sides have complicated the task of collaboration with gratuitous partisan sniping and promises made to their respective political bases that will be very difficult to explain if they are broken, or even watered down.
Youngkin has repeatedly and publicly stoked his party’s inflexibly conservative base, blistering Democrats at highly inopportune times. Leading Democrats have taken to social media platforms to rub salt in Youngkin’s wounds each time one of his initiatives fails.
Going down to the wire to put a budget in place is not new to Virginians. Legislators return to Richmond on May 13 for their ninth special session in seven years. In 2022, the most recent comparable year in which a budget had to be in place by the end of June to avoid government shutdowns, it was signed into law with just 13 days to spare.
It would be easy to blame an anachronistic, part-time legislature that is the legacy of a time when Virginia was overwhelmingly rural and agriculture dominated its economy. That is a valid observation. The issues presented by a high-tech economy and an increasingly suburbanized culture demand more time for study and thought than those of 50 or even 30 years ago.
The brinksmanship that forced this spring’s eleventh-hour deliberations, however, feels forced and phony, yet wholly a product of our times. Look no farther than Washington to set the example. Consider the times recently that Congress has brought the nation to the brink of looming shutdowns, potentially damaging the global economy, before passing stopgap resolutions that defer the moment of reckoning for a few more months.
On Capitol Hill, as on Capitol Square, the root cause is the same: politicians who put year-round campaigning and fundraising ahead of their duty to govern. They believe, falsely, that governing can be a zero-sum game that one side wins outright at the expense of the adversary’s unconditional defeat.
In Virginia, budgeting is clearer than the hand-to-mouth approach at the federal level. Each even-numbered year, our leaders either have a budget in place by the first of July or things lurch to a halt because state government loses its power to pay bills. It also differs from Congress because Virginia’s Constitution does not permit the state to end a fiscal biennium with a deficit, as Congress routinely does.
Virginia’s leaders are belatedly forced to the table by an unyielding fiscal calendar and the unnerving consequences of failure, not by the better angels of their nature.
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Mark J. Rozell is the dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University where he holds the Ruth D. and John T. Hazel Chair in Public Policy. His latest book (with John G. Milliken) is “The New Dominion: Twentieth-Century Elections That Shaped Modern Virginia” (2023). Contact him at mrozell@gmu.edu.