Schapiro: One-party government may be anything but

You've got to hand it to Virginia Republicans: They may have perfected the good-cop, bad-cop routine. On the same day Gov. Bob McDonnell was talking up cooperation between the parties, GOP senators were taking down Democrats in a burst of cocksure partisanship.

This is not to suggest Senate Democrats are victims, other than victims of their naïveté. Even after the power grab in the evenly divided Senate on the tiebreaking vote of a Republican lieutenant governor, some Democrats blithely said they can reason with GOP leaders Tommy Norment and Walter Stosch. That assumes Norment and Stosch actually are in charge.

As the GOP completed its second takeover of state government — the first, a decade ago, flamed out within two years — on display were internal tensions that suggest one-party rule will be anything but. Put another way: The Republican majority in the Senate doesn't fully resemble the Republican Party.

It's a theme that roils congressional Republicans (Eric Cantor versus John Boehner); is playing out in the GOP Senate primary (Bob Marshall versus George Allen) and drives jockeying for the party's 2013 gubernatorial nomination (Bill Bolling versus Ken Cuccinelli).

To become majority leader in a caucus in which he and other moderates are outnumbered 5-to-1, Norment had to accommodate conservatives who are rightfully — pun intended — suspicious of an occasionally high-handed, tax-raising dealmaker sometimes as unsubtle as his shirts and ties.

That meant upending tradition by throwing senators off committees. This made room for Republicans, philosophically reorienting committees. It also allowed Republicans to settle scores with Democrats. And the committee template is virtually locked in for four years, meaning Republicans keep the upper hand, even if a Democrat is elected LG next year.

Democrats Toddy Puller of Fairfax, Creigh Deeds of Bath (his party's defeated nominee for governor in 2009) and Donald McEachin of Henrico (mastermind of the failed legal challenge to GOP control of the Senate) were booted from Commerce and Labor, a prized assignment because its oversight of big business means big contributions for committee members.

Deeds and Chap Petersen of Fairfax were dumped from Courts, which writes the criminal law and screens judicial prospects. The committee's former chairman, Henry Marsh of Richmond, inspired a Republican-written rules change. No longer can bills be killed by subcommittees, as one impaneled by Marsh — adopting a tactic of the GOP House — did to legislation making it easier to carry a concealed gun in a bar.

George Barker of Fairfax was tossed from Privileges and Elections, the committee that draws legislative boundaries. Barker was the Democrats' go-to guy on redistricting, fashioning a map they believed was a firewall against GOP dominance. Events proved otherwise, but not without Republicans, including Norment, grousing that Democrats had done dirty with their districts.

There's nothing tidy about making committee assignments. Republicans say their interests were as much numerical as philosophical, correcting an imbalance of both under Democrats. But deciding which Republicans got which seats required slicing the pie into many parts many times.

The awkwardness of that process — and the arguments it triggered within the fragile Republican caucus — may be most evident on the committee most closely watched by social and religious conservatives: Education and Health, for years a Democratic killing field for abortion restrictions.

It now has a GOP majority and its members include some of the legislature's most vocal opponents of abortion. But the swing vote on the committee, from which an abortion-rights Democrat, John Edwards of Roanoke, was removed, could now be a moderate Republican: Harry Blevins of Chesapeake. His support in 2011 of hospital-like standards for abortion clinics was viewed by abortion-rights advocates as an election-year exercise in political survival.

Another GOP tweak to the rules bans senators from using props during floor speeches. Perhaps Republicans feared Dick Black of Loudoun, an abortion foe, would wave around a pink plastic likeness of a fetus, like those he gave away as a member of the House.

Seems the rules may even protect Republicans from themselves.