Amid sharpening partisan divisions, some legislators find consensus
February 3, 2023
By: David Ress
While partisan divisions may have sharpened in Virginia’s legislature, with a Democratic-controlled state Senate and Republican majority in the House of Delegates, a 20-plus-year effort to set staffing standards for nursing homes was still completed on a bipartisan basis.
Del. Bobby Orrock, R-Caroline, and Del. Vivian Watts, D-Fairfax, teamed up on an innovative effort that bases staffing standards on hours of patient care and that includes both carrots, such as a new Medicaid program to provide incentives for improved care, and sticks, in the form of Department of Health enforcement.
“Again and again over 20 years the delegate [Orrock] would look me in the eye and promise as it was approved ... that somehow it would be funded,” Watts said.
Watts said that, before the session, Orrock came to her office and said: “’You know, Vivian, I’d really like you as co-patron.’ That’s the kind of partnership that can produce results if we all, indeed, look at these most serious problems.”
The bill passed the House, 98-2. In another example of bipartisanship, the two who opposed the measure were conservative Del. Marie March, R-Floyd, and Del. Candi Mundon King, D-Prince William.
Orrock and Watts are not the only Democrats and Republicans to work together despite their differences on high-profile political flashpoints such as abortion, guns, election law and criminal justice bills. On all of these issues, party-line voting is growing more common.
Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County, a lawyer who defends people accused of crimes, has in years past voted with Democratic colleagues who share his views on the expansion of the rights of defendants. But this year, he voted against Senate Bill 1282, a measure that would allow people to do community service in lieu of paying court fines and fees they could not afford, sponsored by state Sen. Jennifer Boysko, D-Fairfax. The bill is working its way to the Senate floor. The House criminal justice subcommittee derailed the same proposal from Del. Cia Price, D-Newport News.
When asked why, Stanley shrugged and said, “It’s all party line these days.”
On the other hand, the conservative Stanley, who last year added two beagles from the now-shuttered Envigo breeding facility in Cumberland County to his menagerie of dogs and cats, teamed up with Boysko, another Senate animal lover, on a bill to set up an Animal Welfare Whistle Blower Reward Fund, which would boost fines for violating state animal welfare law. The bill passed the Senate Agriculture Conservation and Natural Resources committee unanimously, and is pending before the Finance Committee.
Mental health
In another Democrat and Republican alliance — one crossing another great legislative divide, the one between Senate and House — state Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Bath, and Del. Rob Bell, R-Albemarle, are each carrying bills that would allow people held against their will under temporary detention orders issued in response to mental health crises to go free before the 72-hour TDOs expire if they no longer meet the criteria for issuance of the order. Magistrates issue TDOs upon a finding that a person is at serious risk of harming him or herself or others, or is unable to look after basic human needs.
Deeds wants to change that. He says the imposed detentions are bad for people and are badly straining Virginia’s underfunded and long-troubled public mental health system, where many people subject to a TDO end up.
“I think there are issues that are seen as having no partisan overlay; when it comes to mental health, you do see the parties coming together,” said Bell, who serves with Deeds on the General Assembly’s Behavioral Health Commission.
“One issue we see is a shortage of beds” for temporary detention orders, “and we’ve been looking for anything we can do to ease the pressure so people can get treatment quicker,” he said.
In this 2022 image, Del. Rob Bell, R-Albemarle, left, confers with Sen. Monty Mason, D-Williamsburg, outside the House of Delegates chamber. They are working together on legislation to help people with mental illness.
Bell is working with another Democrat on the commission, state Sen. Monty Mason, D-Williamsburg, on another idea to help people with mental illness: a process to divert from jail people with mental illness who are charged with trespassing, vandalism, public drunkenness or disorderly conduct. The process would allow judges to order people in such circumstances to get mental health treatment without any decision on the misdemeanor charges. It is a tough issue, and Mason pulled his bill last week so he, Bell and others on the commission can work on it more. Bell’s bill was put on ice for the same reason.
Bell and Boysko, the liberal animal lover already working with Stanley on animal welfare bills, are each sponsoring bills to clarify that the crime of strangling another person, which is currently described as the application of pressure to the neck, also includes blocking or obstructing another person’s airway. These bills are working their way through committees.
Gaming
Yet another cross-party collaboration is the effort by Del. Paul Krizek, D-Fairfax, and state Sen. Bryce Reeves, R-Spotsylvania, to push the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services to focus on helping people who cannot control their desire to gamble. In addition, they are working together on bills to tighten oversight of charitable gaming—such as bingo games and pull-tabs—and to get operators of historical horse racing games to organize more live racing days.
“I was in the ABC subcommittee when he came in with a bill on charitable gaming,” said Krizek, referring to Reeves’ 2021 legislation to tighten state oversight of bingo, pull-tab and sealed card games. “And I thought he was making sense.”
“He was saying what I was seeing, that charitable gaming was growing and it was death by a thousand cuts ... was a $2 billion business,” Krizek said.
It is a substantial enough business, at a time when other gaming is booming, to lead both legislators to start talking together about the problem of gambling. Reeves’ bill passed the Senate 39-0, while Krizek’s bill is making its way to the House floor.
‘Swatting’
Upset by prank calls that summon dozens of police to respond to non-existent threats, Del. Wendell Walker, R-Lynchburg, and Del. Angelia Williams Graves, D-Norfolk, each had nearly identical bills to make the placement of such calls a misdemeanor, subject to a jail term of up to one year and a fine of up to $2,500.
On the morning of the day they each presented their bills to the House criminal justice subcommittee, Walker told his fellow legislators that a prank call forced E.C. Glass High School, in his district, to lock down.
“This is not the first time this has happened in the city of Lynchburg over the last year and, unfortunately I’m sure this will not be the last time for any of our districts,” he said.
Prank calls, or “swatting”—so named because they can bring out SWAT teams unnecessarily—are becoming a major cost to law enforcement in terms of officers’ time, as well as a loss to schools in terms of instructional time, Graves said.
“We need to make the punishment fit the crime,” she said.
A bipartisan group of Senate moms—Jill Holtzman Vogel, R-Fauquier; Boysko; and Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond—have a measure to tackle a concern of modern parents: the tendency to charge parents with child neglect when their kids do kid-like things, such as travel to or from school or nearby locations by bicycle or on foot without an adult to supervise. This bill won unanimous approval in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Worforce development
State Sens. Frank Ruff, R-Mecklenburg, and Joe Morrissey, D-Richmond, have joined forces to move forward on Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s proposal to consolidate the state’s several workforce development agencies into a single Department of Workforce Development and Advancement. Del. Kathy Byron, R-Bedford, carried the same bill in the House but, while it passed her Commerce and Energy Committee, it did so only on a party line. Bipartisanship goes only so far. The bill is slated for consideration by the full House.
Senate Minority Leader Tommy Norment, R-James City, while speaking at community forums and campaign events back home in the Historic Triangle, has for years bemoaned the General Assembly’s increasingly fierce partisan division.
In recent days, he was taken aback by a Virginia Democratic Party tweet that featured a TV clip in which Norment noted businesses had not rallied to support Youngkin’s corporate tax cut. The tweet concluded that “Youngkin’s tax policy doesn’t even have the support of corporations or his own party.”
Norment, who is carrying the bill for Youngkin’s individual income tax cuts, voted for the corporate tax cut, as did the four other Republicans on the Democratic-held Senate Finance Committee.
“This sort of thing doesn’t contribute to bipartisanship,” Norment said. “But we’re seeing more and more of it these days.”
He said cooperation between Democrats and Republicans sometimes seems limited to only technical or minor measures, like a bill he and McClellan are sponsoring. It would require the Virginia Conflict of Interest and Ethics Advisory Council to provide training on state conflicts of interest law to members of appointed school boards, in addition to the many other state and local officials who already get the training.
“On major policy, ideological differences are wide,” he said.
But there is one important haven, he added: the budget-writing committees.
“It’s always been like that,” said Norment, the former co-chairman of the Senate Finance Committee—even when Democrats and Republicans take different views on such issues as taxes.
For budget writers however, the differences are less a matter of Democrats versus Republicans than Senate versus House—both chambers typically approve budgets with significant differences, at which point a small, bipartisan group of senior senators and delegates sit down to hammer out a compromise in a so-called conference committee.
There is basic consensus on the need to be careful about spending too much, about maintaining financial reserves and about protecting the state’s triple-A bond rating—the best that credit-rating agencies quote, and a grade that assures that when the state borrows money, it gets the best possible interest rate.
“It’s hard to get too ideological” about budgets, Norment said.