Pop quiz, kids! Let’s play a game of Who Controls The Government?!
Before the elections, which party held each office or chamber?
Governor: Democratic
Lt. Governor: Democratic
Attorney General: Democratic
House of Delegates: Republican
State Senate: Republican
After the elections, which party holds each office or chamber?
Governor: Democratic
Lt. Governor: Democratic
Attorney General: Democratic
House of Delegates: Republican
State Senate: Republican
This might flummox the editors of the Washington Post, individuals who did everything humanly possible to attack Republican gubernatorial nominee Ed Gillespie and destroy the Republican majorities in Virginia — not through the virtue of the ideas of the left, but by wagging a finger at the vices of Donald J. Trump, mind you.
Thus the sheer panic and terror from the newspaper who for more than a decade has leveraged the Democratic Party as a vehicle for their own ideas:
VIRGINIA GOV. Ralph Northam (D) took office with an inaugural speech reminding lawmakers that “Virginians didn’t send us here to be Democrats or Republicans — they sent us here to solve problems.” Two days after that eloquent bid for bipartisanship for the good of the commonwealth, Republicans responded. Their uncompromising answer: Not so much.
Really? Because the hyperpartisan speech that Governor Northam gave to the General Assembly on Monday was practically an open declaration of war against Virginia’s business community — nevermind just the Republicans.
In summarily rejecting a package of gun-control bills backed by Mr. Northam, a Republican-controlled Senate committee made clear it had no interest in working with the governor on his legislative priorities. That Virginia voters showed support for these initiatives by electing Mr. Northam didn’t seem to matter. Did Republicans learn anything from last fall’s elections?
Well, yes we did. We learned that all 100 seats in the House of Delegates came up, and despite millions of dollars in dark money from outside organizations (some of whom had Russian connections) and a volte face on offshore drilling in exchange for the League of Conservation Voters throwing millions more into the race, after Planned Parenthood spent millions, and after a consistent five month pounding from the Washington Post linking every conservative to Trump? Republicans still won a 51-49 seat majority in the House of Delegates.
…and are looking to take back the seats we lost in 2019 — eight by our count.
Voting largely along party lines, the Senate Courts of Justice Committee on Monday rejected a number of modest measures proposed by Democrats to combat gun violence.
Such as the imposition of one gun a month, which is already being openly discussed? Because after all, you’d tolerate those sorts of restrictions on your First Amendment… one book a month, right? No? Then why would anyone tolerate such (unconstitutional) restrictions on your 2A rights?
In addition to not listening to an electorate that gave Mr. Northam a landslide victory and elected other gun-control proponents in upset races, Senate Republicans also paid no heed to last year’s violence at a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville where the response of authorities was inhibited by the heavy presence of guns.
Link, link, link as if this gives the argument validity, let’s boil down precisely what the Washington Post is implying here — if you don’t support a restriction on your 2A rights, you support tacitly the violence in Charlottesville… which last we checked, involved an automobile — not a firearm.
Bills similar to those killed by the Senate are pending in the House.
They’ll die there too.
Since Republicans only have control of the House because they were lucky in what was basically a coin toss to decide the outcome of one seat, one would think — or at least hope — they might be more responsive and responsible on this issue.
One might helpfully suggest that if the WaPo wants to govern, they should set down their pens and pick up a bullhorn — and campaign for office themselves.
Mr. Northam, for his part, vowed not to give up. “As long as Virginians’ lives are at risk because there are too many guns in the hands of people who would use them to harm others, we will fight on this ground,” he said Monday after the defeat of the gun-control measures in the Senate committee.
By not give up, apparently that means he will have the Washington Post do the heavy lifting for him during the session.
That Mr. Northam came under immediate criticism from Republicans for a campaign-style tone is pretty rich considering the success of his most recent campaign and the refusal of Republicans to recognize it by working him even a little bit on needed gun control.
…not least of which, the aggressive push for controversial issues came just hours after what was proven to be a vapid and empty call for bipartisanship — one that fell catastrophically flat as gun control became the first and foremost issue Democratic leadership pushed for in the General Assembly — not jobs, not the economy, not education or transportation… but gun control.
For all the triumphalism that the Democrats and their masters in the legacy media have poured upon the 2018 gubernatorial inauguration, they have missed something very key in all of this. Democrats didn’t win anything. They made up no ground. Sure, they gained seats in the House of Delegates on an anti-Trump wave… but did they win on ideas in the public square? Of course not.
The mandate that Virginians sent the General Assembly was a rejection of the extremes and an end to the political experiments — nothing more. Trump was an extreme; Republicans were the whipping post. The same lessons were meted out to Democrats in 2010 and 2014, and Republicans erroneously believed that such victories were a vindication of their ideas in the public square, only to find themselves vanquished in 2012 and demoted to second-tier status within their own party in 2016.
Thus far, the Washington Post seems to be encouraging the drones within the Democratic Party of Virginia to drink their own Kool-Aid, operating as if they scored points on ideas rather than demagoguery.
Before the Washington Post and the drones at DPVA go off on gerrymandering, it should be reminded that Republicans enjoy a 21-19 majority in the Virginia Senate — in lines drawn by Democrats to last the next 20 years.
Facts are, Republicans lead the General Assembly because Virginia’s voters chose to put them there. Rather than testing the waters of Republican resolve, Democrats would be far better served to live up to their campaign trail promises of bi-partisan compromise rather than paper over their own bitter (and unsurprisingly, underreported) internal civil war by scoring cheap points and throwing wrenches into the operations of good governance — all at the behest of a Washington Post that is proving daily to be increasingly coming to the side of opinion journalism rather than playing to the pretense of objectivity.
