Following the apparent defeat of the GOP transportation package in the Senate Finance Committee, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine appealed to the fractious General Assembly leadership yesterday to keep working on a transportation compromise. “We need everyone to stay at the table. I’m not taking my marbles and going home,” said the Governor, as quoted by Michael Hardy and Jeff E. Schapiro in the Times-Dispatch.
No additional work would have been necessary if the Governor had exercised some restraint over his fellow Democrats in the Senate who joined with Sen. John J. Chichester, R-Northumberland, to back a competing proposal and scuttle the GOP package in the process. Kaine has done a lot of posturing in front of the microphones, but if he has done anything constructive to negotiate a compromise, no evidence of it has surfaced in press reports.
Not that I’m looking for a deal at this point. Anything resulting from a union of the Chichester/Democrat faction and the Senate/House GOP faction would be too atrocious to contemplate.