Schapiro: Democrats still have a card to play on the budget

After helping kill one of fellow Republican Bob McDonnell's marquee proposals — legislation making it easier to fire public-school teachers — Tommy Norment was taken to the woodshed: the governor's office.

McDonnell told the state Senate majority leader he was none too pleased by the defeat, the biggest since McDonnell's flop on liquor privatization. The latest was made worse by parliamentary shenanigans. Norment and another GOP senator, John Watkins of Powhatan, refused to vote. In General Assembly parlance, they walked.

That prevented a tie vote in the evenly divided Senate. It would have been broken — in McDonnell's favor — by his chosen heir, Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling. Needless to say, Republicans were annoyed, more so by Norment's gamesmanship.

But while Norment's supposed friends were piling on, so, too, were his actual enemies: Democrats.

This time, they're threatening impasse on the budget, perhaps as early as Thursday, when the Senate is scheduled to vote on its version of a two-year, $85 billion spending plan. It can be avoided, Democrats say, if Norment and his caucus agree to changes in committee memberships and, possibly, chairmanships.

Democrats, whose urgency on committee make-up is heightened by the gush of hard-right legislation, also are pressing McDonnell to back their demands. They're signaling to the governor that the Virginia budget — his budget, the fiscal foundation of his legacy — could hang in the balance.

Neither Norment nor McDonnell is giving in, at least not now.

Anticipating a possible standoff, Senate Republicans had hoped to win over Democrats with accommodations on education and transportation. The GOP rejected McDonnell's sales-tax grab for roads, protecting an important trove of cash for schools, and agreed to automatic increases in the fuel tax, the primary source of highway dollars.

McDonnell's pointed public criticism of Democrats for supposedly refusing to work with Republicans on the budget — and the Democrats' similarly snarky response — is a screen behind which is unfolding a private high-stakes drama that could change the direction of the Senate.

Even before legislators returned to Richmond last month, Senate Democrats urged Republicans to share power. The heavily conservative GOP caucus refused, relying on the vote of its de facto 21st member — Bolling — to stack committees and install Republican chairmen.

Democrats turned to the courts to determine the limits of Bolling's tiebreaking power but were turned down.

What little leverage Democrats have is tied to the General Assembly's biggest job: passing a budget.

To clear the Senate, the budget requires a minimum of 21 votes. One of them can't be the lieutenant governor's. Bolling concedes he can't vote on the budget — that the Virginia Constitution requires it to be approved only by legislators.

This means, that when it comes to the budget, one vote — one Democratic vote — stands between Senate action and inaction. Democrats say they're standing firm: No changes on committees, no budget.

It raises the possibility of a back-to-the-future moment: that the Senate would have little time, if any, to express its will on spending.

That's because the Senate would have to wait until receiving the House-passed budget, a pattern undone in the early 1980s, when Ed Willey, the cheerfully tyrannical Finance Committee chairman, decreed the Senate would write its own budget rather than react to the House's.

But if Senate Democrats, holding out for new committee lineups, refuse as well to vote on the House draft, the budget process would grind to a halt. That could lead to a repeat of 2001, when a House-Senate deadlock allowed Gov. Jim Gilmore to take full command of the budget.

It was a huge embarrassment for the Republicans who controlled all three branches of government, feeding voters' appetite for change. That year, Democrat Mark Warner was elected governor, promising to work with both parties.

Eleven years later, one party is working over the other. But as Democrats and Republicans are fond of saying, elections have consequences.