Democrat-controlled Senate committees have been killing House Republican bills, blocking policy changes on elections, guns, and the environment. More bills on education, abortion, and taxes are set to be heard in committees that have already killed similar Senate bills. However, even if those bills are killed, some of them still have a chance to be included in the budget.
“There’s still a lot of time left, we got the budget document we’re working on. A lot of our funding opportunities are in the budget,” House Majority Leader Terry Kilgore (R-Gate City) told The Virginia Star. “A lot of these bills that we’re talking about are in the budget. We took out RGGI [Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative] in our budget.”
On Tuesday, the Senate Agriculture, Conservation, and Natural Resources Committee killed Kilgore’s HB 1301, a bill to withdraw Virginia from RGGI, a program where utilities have to bid for carbon dioxide emissions allowances. Governor Glenn Youngkin has said leaving the initiative is one of his policy goals, but his ability to accomplish that by executive action has been questioned by Democrats.
The budget is the one piece of legislation that the General Assembly must pass, and there will be extensive compromise and discussion over which items are funded, and by how much. Policy changes made through the biennial budget last as long as the budget, and aren’t as permanent as changes to the Code of Virginia. Still, two years is plenty of time for initiatives like Youngkin’s push for a one-year gas tax suspension. In order to get there, legislators must persuade their counterparts on the other side of the Capitol to support their budget proposals — and Senate Democrats take pride in being a “brick wall” to many key Republican policies.
“So there’s going to be some negotiations as we move forward, and I think we’re going to see the brick wall has got little cracks in it here and there,” Kilgore said.
He said that House Republicans are also blocking Democratic bills: “Some of the things that we think are going too far against the business community in commerce, some of the criminal justice items,” he said.
“We’re in a process too of making sure some of their bad bills don’t get out,” he said. “So it’s going to be a tit-for-tat for a while, but I think at the end of the day with us, and with Governor Youngkin being able to amend and send bills back, amendments back, and veto them, I think at the end of the day, we’re going to be fine.”
– – –
Eric Burk is a reporter at The Virginia Star and The Star News Digital Network. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Terry Kilgore” by Terry Kilgore. Background Photo “Virginia Capitol” by Martin Kraft. CC BY-SA 3.0.
