In December 2007, I put out my legislative agenda for the 2008 General Assembly session. It consisted of the following:
- Nonpartisan redistricting
- Payday lending reform
- Real estate tax relief
- Restoring felons right to vote
- Verifiable voting
Throughout the 2008 session, I followed all the bills related to these topics. At the end, while there were some minor victories, mainly in the area of verifiable voting, my agenda was defeated. Late last year, someone asked me if I was going to put out an agenda for this session. I said no.
The reason I didn’t put out an agenda this year is simple: what was important to me for the 2008 session remained the same in 2010. And while there were numerous bills on most of these topics during this soon-to-be-completed legislative session, the results are the same.
No to nonpartisan or bipartisan redistricting. Once again, an early morning meeting of a House subcommittee killed this and the electeds will continue to choose their constituents rather than the other way around.
No to payday lending reform. Too many legislators feed at the trough of payday lenders to re-regulate these guys.
No to real estate tax relief. Heck, this one hasn’t even been broached since 2008.
No to restoring felons right to vote. Period.
No to verifiable voting. You can have a paper trail for your ATM but not for your votes.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I chose not to participate in the insanity that the General Assembly has become, or, perhaps, has always been. Every year, these well-intentioned men and women head to Richmond and come home crowing about “brochure bills” that never pass. “I introduced ….,” they say. What they don’t say is that the bill didn’t go anywhere.
Wins and losses are measured not by how well they did in doing the people’s business but in terms of politics: which Republican voted for a Democratic bill or which Democrat voted for a Republican bill. Deal making is rampant. I find it absolutely incredulous that effort has to be spent on writing ethics bills. Come on: if it smells bad, it probably is.
Lost in all of this is the reason they were elected in the first place: to represent us, not themselves, to the best of their ability.
With rare exceptions, it’s not about us.
Next year, the entire General Assembly will be up for re-election. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll get some representatives in the mix who are willing to do the right thing by us. I have hope.
But only a little.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
As I read your post I was reminded of a neighbor we had when we first moved back to this area in 1983. Cliff was a professor at ODU.
Somewhere about that time, I read in the paper that the ODU faculty was all up at arms because the university was going to raise the faculty parking permit fee by $2 a semester, or something trivial like that. The faculty held meetings. They circulated petitions. The appointed a group to go hang out at the university president’s office. And so.
I was amazed at how faculty members, well-paid as some of them are, could get so upset and theatrical about a $2 fee increase for a service that was already being heavily subsidized for them.
Cliff had two explanations:
1 – That everything in the university “civil service”–i.e. salaries– is public and published. So there are only little things to make big squabbles over.
2- That getting upset about a $2 a semester parking increase diverted attention from the really important things they should have been worrying about.
So as the General Assembly continues to waste time on things like banning the illegal implantation of GPS devices under employees’ skin, they’re distracted from doing the things that count.
I agree some what, but even the most well intended person up there runs in to the political wall. The party in control, the republicans, are going to carry the water for their Governor, and the democrats, are making deals to get something for themselves, or for their districts. It’s not pretty, but I doubt electing different folks is going to change the process. It is human nature, like Chris pointed out, what’s in it for me.