Even the most disaffected Virginia voter must look with dismay at the pitiful efforts put forward by Virginia Republicans in this election season and in their years of ascendancy in the Virginia legislature.After decades of kowtowing to the irresponsible right, ideologue Governors Allen and Gilmore nearly bankrupted the Government, only to scream and cry like children when Democratic Governors Warner and Kaine worked with the few remaining moderates in the party to put the fiscal house in order.
Learning no lessons from successive electoral losses in 2005 and 2006, Republicans remained locked in the group think of failure, assailed and forced the retirement of many of the moderates, and this year's legislative sessions, under Republican domination, created a horrendous monstrosity hoping to balance the books by creating the $3500 speeding ticket: the hated Republican "abuser fees".
This Washinton Post Op-Ed, describes the situation:
Rather than addressing Virginia's most pressing problem, a deteriorating transportation system, moderate Republicans in the state Senate and conservatives in the House of Delegates wasted two years on intraparty squabbling. Desperate to avert electoral disaster, they finally cobbled together a plan this year. But the funding they provided is scarcely half what transportation planners considered minimally adequate for Northern Virginia, the state's most clogged region. And rather than using statewide taxes -- the method by which new roads and transit have been financed for decades -- the GOP instead told Northern Virginians that they were free to tax themselves.
Rather than dwelling on their dubious transportation achievement, Republicans in Northern Virginia have turned their attention to illegal immigrants. They hope to capitalize on legitimate concerns on the part of neighborhoods uneasy with the presence of illegal immigrants living in group houses, and of local governments struggling to provide education and other services to undocumented workers and their families. But the bitter truth is that the state can do relatively little about a problem whose causes lie squarely with the federal government's, and Congress's, failure to devise a workable national immigration policy. Rather than presenting a platform to improve education, public safety and health care in Virginia, many Republicans are hoping that a program of hounding illegal immigrants is the key to electoral success. It shouldn't be.The Democrats have a different story to tell, including the victories of two straight Democratic governors, Mark R. Warner and Timothy M. Kaine, whose solid, relatively nonpartisan competence has stood in contrast to the GOP's squabbling. If the Democrats retake control of the Senate, which they lost a decade ago, at least three senior Northern Virginia senators -- Richard L. Saslaw, Charles J. Colgan and Mary Margaret Whipple -- would assume key leadership positions. That would give the region the kind of clout in Richmond it has lacked for years.
The Republican party has been taken over by bizarre extremists so out of touch with the desires of actual Virginians, that they are on the verge of becoming Virginia's minority party for at least a generation. This turn of events is richly deserved. Perhaps forty years wandering in the desert will result in some insight, humanity and common decency from a desperate, grim party which has clearly lost its way.
If every RK reader submitted a LTE on a weekly basis, we'd never have another Republican-American elected to office in the commonwealth.