Ah, divided government as practiced in the General Assembly – it’s a ray of sunshine over the winter months.
With Republicans in charge of the House of Delegates and Democrats running the state Senate, this year’s session (like 2022) features the extremes of the majority party in each body pressing their agendas through legislation, only to see those bills crash and burn when they move over to the other house.
A good deal of left-wing measures from the Senate are being unceremoniously pole-axed in the House of Delegates, while right-wing bills emanating from the House of Delegates are finding themselves garroted across the hall in the Senate.
(Apparently, based on the phraseology of the previous paragraph, we are in something of a medieval frame of mind today.)
This is all good news for Virginians, who suffered in recent years both when Republicans controlled all levers of power in Richmond and then, briefly, Democrats did. The state careened too far to the extremes in each case until voters, sensibly, installed divided government to keep matters in check.
It’s a decision that proves the wisdom embodied (most of the time) by the voting public.
