Speaker of the House William J. Howell, R-Stafford, officially announced Monday that he will not run for re-election this year but instead will retire after 30 years in the House of Delegates, the last 15 as speaker.
Howell, who will turn 74 in May, said in a speech on the House floor that serving as speaker for 15 years "truly has been the greatest professional honor of my life."
Howell expressed his love of the House of Delegates, adding: "I believe it represents the hope, enduring strength and resiliency of our exciting and ongoing experiment in representative government."
Howell will retire after the end of his two-year term in January. Following Howell's speech Monday, delegates on both sides of the aisle took turns paying tribute to his service.
His decision to step down is likely to open the door for House Majority Leader M. Kirkland Cox, R-Colonial Heights, to become speaker next year.
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Howell’s retirement will mark the end of an era for the unquestioned leader of a House that was reeling when he became speaker in 2003 after the resignation of Speaker S. Vance Wilkins Jr. the previous year amid a sexual harassment scandal. Howell will end his career as the second longest-serving House speaker in Virginia history, after Edgar Blackburn “Blackie” Moore, who held the job from 1950 through 1967.
Howell took a narrow Republican majority after the end of a power-sharing agreement with Democrats and built it into a lopsided Republican majority, boosted by a 2011 redistricting plan that currently is under constitutional challenge before the U.S. Supreme Court and in Richmond Circuit Court.
Led by the speaker, the House majority — now 66-34 — created “a firewall” against expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act in Virginia, rejecting four attempts by Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe to expand health coverage for hundreds of thousands of uninsured Virginians.
Howell also went to the Virginia Supreme Court with other Republican leaders last year to overturn McAuliffe’s blanket order to restore voting and other civil rights to felons who have completed their terms, which Howell’s admirers said was the first time in state history a speaker had blocked an executive order in court.
The decision was made possible by his and other Republicans’ success in replacing McAuliffe’s appointment to the high court, Jane Marum Roush, with Stephen R. McCullough, a conservative jurist who voted against the governor’s order.
First elected to the House in 1987, Howell was credited by both parties for a steady, low-key leadership style that relied more on a quick wit than an iron fist, but he also established an ideological beachhead in the General Assembly from which he advanced conservative policy initiatives pushed by the American Legislative Exchange Council that he once led as national chairman.
He has been a prodigious fundraiser for Republican candidates and causes, with an estimated $25 million raised over his career.
At the same time, unlike when the House was under Democratic control, he implemented proportional party representation on House committees, despite a Republican majority that reached 68 of the 100 seats in the chamber before receding slightly to its current margin.
As speaker, Howell has held a firmly conservative position against tax increases, despite a $1.4 billion tax increase the House approved over his objections in 2004 under then-Gov. Mark Warner, a Democrat.
However, he sponsored transportation funding legislation in 2013 with then-Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, to raise almost $6 billion in state and regional taxes for road and transit projects over six years.
The next year, the speaker pushed the General Assembly to adopt legislation that, in cooperation with McAuliffe, created a non-political, data-driven system for ranking transportation projects, now known as SmartScale, to assure the public that tax dollars raised under the transportation funding plan would be well spent.
One of Howell’s biggest legislative goals remains unfinished — creation of an optional retirement savings plan for state and local government employees that would move Virginia away from defined pension benefits that currently carry about $23 billion in long-term unfunded liabilities.
The Senate is poised to adopt legislation sought by the speaker and sponsored by House Appropriations Chairman S. Chris Jones, R-Suffolk, to create an optional defined contribution plan for state and local employees in mid-2019, but the Senate Finance Committee added a clause to require the legislation’s re-enactment by the assembly next year before it could become law.
The legislation came out of the Commission on Employment Retirement Security & Pension Reform, an initiative that Howell created and chaired to go beyond the pension reforms he helped advance in 2012 to reduce liabilities for state employee and teacher retirement plans. However, the optional retirement savings plan ultimately was overshadowed by the commission’s top priority of restoring a lost pay increase for a state work force facing a major turnover.
Howell, a Baptist, is deeply religious. He conducts a weekly, early morning Bible Study Caucus and says he makes tough decisions with prayer.
In 2013, Howell angered Senate Republican leaders by ruling against their legislative maneuver that sought to change Senate district boundaries. Senate Republicans made the effort while then-Sen. Henry L. Marsh III, D-Richmond, was away from the evenly split Senate in order to attend President Barack Obama’s second inauguration, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
“It wasn’t something I relished,” Howell said after he ruled that the proposed Senate amendments were not germane to the legislation Republican senators had hijacked in a bid to implement their redistricting plan.
“It’s my job. I’m the only one who can make that decision,” Howell said. “I talked to a lot of people about it, prayed about it, feel at peace about what I did. Think I did what was right.”