By Peter Galuszka
It’s so-called halftime at the Virginia General Assembly, and with conservative Republicans holding sway and many serious problems facing the Commonwealth, here’s what we’ve come up with so far:
- Women exercising their constitutional right to have an abortion now will be forced to undergo and pay for an ultrasound before the procedure. There’s no medical reason for this, just to shame the woman into reconsidering so that right-to-lifers can feel good about themselves. Conservative Republicans, mind you, want to keep the government out of our private lives.
- After years of supplying a lot of the East Coast with handguns, Virginia limited purchases to once a month. No longer. Now gun fanatics can exercise their Second Amendment Rights as many times a month as they want and blast away. Rock on!
- If you have been laid off or were born into a low income family and need public housing, the state wants to check into your urine to see if you abuse drugs. If you are poor, you are suspect. If you are rich, congratulations, sir!
- If you look foreign and sound like Cheech and Chong, the cops have to check to see if you are in this country legally if they happen to stop you for running a red light. How they do this quickly, no one knows exactly, since drivers licenses can be issued to anyone regardless of nationality. The police community is screaming that they don’t have the resources to handle this and even the Richmond Times-Dispatch says it is a bad idea. No matter, hard-right-wingers have to keep up with Alabama and Arizona.
- In a move that is certain to save Virginia’s economy from the horrid onslaught of labor unionism, state money can’t be used to fund public works projects that have agreements that require that some of the work go to firms represented by unions. It has to do with Dulles Rail, a big transit project up DC way. It is important to let them Yankees and DCists know that this here’s the South and we don’t cotton to no unions.
Meanwhile, more pressing matters await, such as a budget. It seems that Gov. Robert F. McDonnell’s plan to put the screws to education and use part of its General Fund payments to boost transportation isn’t getting very far.
Ditto the conservative schemes to stick it to our lazy and inept public school teachers. They want to upend the status quo with new plans to subject teachers with tougher new performance appraisals. Mind you, there has been no solid evidence or public outcry that this is needed. Rather some of the right-wing think tanks decided it should be an issue. One reason could be that some teachers are organized into, God forbid, labor unions. It also has racist overtones since it seems aimed at minority teachers in minority and low-income areas.
The anti-teacher movement seems to have been orchestrated months before the legislative session. Read six months of some of the postings on this blog and you will see that somewhere, someone has decided that public school teachers are a major, major problem. Maybe you didn’t notice yourself, but you read it here first!
The big irony is that McDonnell has worked so hard to recast himself from social to moderate conservative so he can more easily pursue national political ambitions. As much as he spins the GA session as progress, it clearly ain’t. The agenda is being controlled by the likes of Bob Marshall and other wingnuts.
As for me, I blame the Democrats, especially national party boss and former governor Tim Kaine. They let the hard righters get a slender majority in the last election and now there’s hell to pay. Ironically, however, the one who might end up paying the most will be Bob McDonnell.
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