With the legislature gone — but not forgotten — Gov. Glenn Youngkin again has to himself the stage that is the state Capitol.
Practicing his hallmark performative politics, the Republican pushed onto X, formerly Twitter, a video in which he huffily declares — before bounding up the stairs toward his office on the third floor of the Jefferson-designed statehouse — that he’s got to act on more than 1,000 bills sent him by the Democrat-controlled General Assembly.
“And we’ve got a budget to fix,” Youngkin says.
At a made-for-TV news conference at an eatery in Chesterfield County, a still GOP-friendly Richmond suburb, Youngkin whined that Democrats had larded the mammoth spending plan with more than $2 billion in new taxes, never mind that one of them — a levy on sales of digital services — was his idea.
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Youngkin towered behind a lectern to which was affixed a sign that read “The Backward Budget.” Clunky optics perhaps?
Paired with an image of the governor, the appellation — intended as a snarky indictment of Democrats’ handiwork — might have been mistaken by some viewers as an affirmation of Youngkin’s fiscal priorities.
Youngkin hasn’t much time to get his messaging straight or to hack through that bumper crop of bills.
The governor has 30 days from the legislature’s adjournment on March 9 to review its handiwork, which represents roughly a third of the 3,500 bills and resolutions introduced by members of the House of Delegates and Virginia Senate.
To meet his April deadline, Youngkin will have to peruse more than 30 bills per day. Lucky for him, the review period was tripled from 10 days — the rule until 1971.
Under the Constitution of Virginia, Youngkin has several options: He can sign a bill into law. He can propose revisions that lawmakers could accept or reject when they return April 17 for their one-day spring session. He can veto a bill; that is, reject it, preventing it from becoming law. Heading into this past weekend, Youngkin had spiked 28 bills, including several prized by Democrats.
And on the budget, he can veto individual appropriations without rejecting the spending plan in its entirety.
The gubernatorial veto is a relatively recent expansion of executive power, a check on the long-dominant legislative branch. Largely based on the presidential veto, it was not available to the governor until 1870, when the first post-Civil War constitution — it also enfranchised formerly enslaved Black men — took effect.
That 19th-century constitution specified, too, the terms under which the legislature could void a gubernatorial veto and pass into law a measure the executive rejected: a two-thirds vote in each chamber of the General Assembly — a requirement that endures to this day.
It is a threshold Democrats, because of their slender majorities, can’t achieve, ensuring Youngkin’s vetoes are likely to stand.
But that’s been the case with gubernatorial vetoes over the past 30 years, a period marked by swings in partisan power and often closely divided legislatures.
The Virginia Public Access Project reports that of 462 vetoes issued since 1994, only two were reversed — both in 2001, during the governorship of Republican Jim Gilmore.
With about 20 months remaining in his term, Youngkin could — when it comes to vetoes — rival or exceed his predecessors.
He’s already hovering around 70 since taking office in 2022, dwarfing the four-year totals of Democrats Ralph Northam (58), Tim Kaine (44), Mark Warner (18) and Republican Bob McDonnell (21).
Youngkin is closing in on Gilmore (91) and another Republican, George Allen (84). But will he overtake the Democrat he narrowly defeated in 2021, Terry McAuliffe, who vetoed 120 bills?
The amendment and veto powers can be consequential. If wielded effectively, Youngkin might achieve policy goals — and exact a measure of revenge. But this assumes, in the case of the former, that Youngkin engages adversaries in horse trading. In the case of the latter, it assumes that horse trading is for naught.
Signals from the administration have been mixed. While trashing Democrats at that Chesterfield event, Youngkin said he still wants to talk with his opponents, aiming to resuscitate a second round of income-tax relief and a proposed taxpayer-financed sportsplex in Alexandria.
Youngkin holds out the possibility of something that’s apparently never been done by a Virginia governor: vetoing the whole budget.
Youngkin first hinted at it in private meetings with Republican legislators in the countdown to adjournment, though he was reminded that the budget, while stripped of the arena and other high-profile initiatives, included funds for such GOP priorities as transportation improvements along the state’s very red mountainous spine.
The budget lends itself to a unique gubernatorial power: the item veto.
It allows a governor to strike individual appropriations and provisions without scuttling the entire budget. The item veto was enshrined in the 1902 constitution, which also — infamously — stripped the vote from nearly all Black Virginians. The item veto’s roots are in Virginia’s racist past: It was a feature of the Confederate constitution.
Gubernatorial revisions, or amendments, to General Assembly-passed bills must be approved by the House and Senate. If amendments are rejected by one chamber, the bill is returned to the governor in the form he received during the legislature’s regular session. The governor can sign or veto the measure, or he can allow it to become law without his signature.
Youngkin’s post-session utterances — those on social media that he fully controls and those he spouts to the fawning interlocutors of Fox News — suggest he’s prepared to inflict pain if he can’t implement programs.
This may be thespianism, an attempt at renewed relevance by a governor on the back end of his four-year term. Youngkin has to turn a negative into a positive; that having lost the legislature to Democrats — in the process, diminishing himself nationally — he remains adamant in resisting the opposition.
The restored Democratic majority didn’t hesitate to demean Youngkin, denying him many of the proposals he envisioned as legacy-builders.
It being the midpoint of his nonrenewable term, this is the moment in which the only budget that is largely Youngkin’s alone is put in place, financing ideas that, ideally, extend beyond the end of his administration in January 2026.
This includes, most notably, those tax cuts and the so-called Glenn-dome that would house professional sports teams, in this instance, a basketball team — the Washington Wizards — and the Washington Capitals of the National Hockey League.
The arena would rise in the former railyard where an earlier governor, Democrat Doug Wilder, failed in 1992 to build a stadium for the Washington Commanders, the pro football team then known as the Redskins.
In addition to the income-tax breaks, Youngkin was thwarted on repeal of the locally imposed car tax, though Youngkin never offered a plan for doing so more than 20 years after a rollback initiated by fellow Republican Gilmore stalled.
Youngkin proposed raising the sales tax nearly a penny and applying it to online services, in tandem with his proposed income-tax cuts. Democrats came up with their own version of a sales tax plan — one Youngkin deems too expensive.
It’s all part of a fight that’s just beginning and is as much theatrical as it is constitutional.