The Mother of Presidents is back at it again.
Through some legal quirk — typical for the Old Dominion — only Mitt Romney and Ron Paul will be on the ballot for the March 6 Republican primary. Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry did not meet the state’s onerous requirement for 10,000 petition signatures including 400 from each of the state’s 11 congressional districts to get on the ballot.
Readers know that I am not generally sympathetic to Republican causes, but what’s happened to Gingrich and Perry is downright idiotic. Virginia is the only state that has such tough primary qualification rules. Indiana is the next strictest, which requires only 4,500 signatures.
Consider some of Virginia’s other strange laws and requirements. We are the only state in the nation that limits its governor to one term, meaning that Virginia only gets maybe three years max work out of a governor’s four-year term. By Year Three, the politician’s mind is already focused on what’s next.
During the Jim Crow era, Virginia was a legislative leader in racism. That wasn’t unusual for the South but the racism seemed to linger very long. Until it was struck down in the late 1960s, a state law made it a felony for a white person to marry an African-American so as to preserve racial purity.
Other bad ideas abound. Luckily, some don’t get to law. One absurd proposal a few years ago would have regulated how low someone could wear his or her pants and how much underwear could be displayed. Legislator Terry Kilgore is the master of strange-O laws. He’s proposed, for instance, tax breaks for people who have their cremated remains blasted into outer space from a commercial spaceport on Wallops Island.
The political nonsense continues with another oddity. Voters participating in the Republican primary are supposed to sign a “loyalty oath” that they will vote for whomever ends up running as the Republican presidential candidate. Wasn’t Virginia supposed to have been the Mother of the Bill of Rights? Besides being unconstitutional, the idea is also downright dumb. How can they enforce it?
Atty. Gen Kenneth Cuccinelli, who is running for governor in 2013 against the plans of the ruling state Republican Politburo, at first said he would try emergency legislative proposals to untie the mess. Then, however, he went along with the GOP Establishment and said that changing laws midstream would somehow be unfair to Romney and Paul. Go figure.
Legislative idiocy has been part of the state’s make-up for far too long. They make Virginians seem like Cooter of the Dukes of Hazzard. With all the state has going for it, one wonders why this nonsense just doesn’t go away.