OPINION:
In taking himself out of the running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination on May 1, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin wisely decided to focus this year not on the White House in Washington but on the Statehouse in Richmond.
Mr. Youngkin’s coattails in November 2021 helped flip control of the Virginia House of Delegates to the GOP, and now he has his eyes set on helping Virginia Republicans to retake the state Senate in this year’s off-off-year elections.
He has vowed to campaign hard between now and November to net at least the two seats needed to reclaim control of the state Senate, where obstructionist lockstep-liberal Democrats have hamstrung much of his commonsense agenda in his first 16 months in office.
Democrats currently control the state Senate 22-18, but if Republicans were to pick up two seats, whenever a vote ended in a 20-20 tie, Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears, presiding over the Senate, could cast the tiebreaking vote. (A net pickup of three or more seats, and thus outright control, would be preferable.)
With both houses of the General Assembly in GOP hands in 2024 and 2025, Mr. Youngkin could undo much of the legislative damage Democrats wrought when they held unitary control of both the General Assembly and the governor’s office in 2020 and 2021 under his predecessor, then-Gov. Ralph Northam.
At or near the top of state Republican lawmakers’ to-do list must be to withdraw Virginia from California’s radical and costly multistate compact that will ban sales of all new gasoline-engine automobiles in the Old Dominion after 2035 in overkill pursuit of the phantom menace of climate change.
Pulling out of that ill-advised compact is imperative, as explained in excruciating detail in Daily Signal columnist Deroy Murdock’s superb April 14 analysis, “Numbers Don’t Lie: Dictator Biden’s Electric Vehicle Edict Is Technologically Unachievable.”
The ban by legislative fiat on the sale of new gasoline-engine automobiles is no less unachievable under the California Air Resources Board’s so-called Advanced Clean Cars II Rule — to say nothing of its throttling of consumer choice in transportation.
Following the California rules, in a scant three years, by 2026, 35% of vehicles sold by manufacturers in Virginia must be zero-emission, according to a report at VirginiaMercury.com. What if consumers are unwilling to buy — or unable to afford — the more expensive zero-emission vehicles in those quantities?
“The law of Virginia should be written by elected leaders here, not outsourced to radical bureaucrats in California,” Mr. Youngkin argued persuasively in his State of the Commonwealth address on Jan. 11. That Maryland and the District of Columbia have, in liberal lemming fashion, also agreed to this bad idea is no reason for Virginia to remain in the compact.
In the near term, a Republican takeover of the state Senate (assuming they retain control of the 100-member House) would also enable passage of two bills thwarted by Democrats a week before the legislative session ended on Feb. 25.
One would have barred biological males from competing in girls’ and women’s athletics. The other would have required school administrators to notify parents if a child “identified” as a gender different from their biological sex.
Both are commonsense measures and enjoy supermajority support in public polling.
“Clear majorities of Americans support restrictions affecting transgender children, a Washington Post-[Kaiser Family Foundation] poll finds, offering political jet fuel for Republicans in state legislatures and Congress who are pushing measures restricting curriculum, sports participation, and medical care,” The Post reported May 5 on its poll, adding: “Republican lawmakers have the wind at their backs on much of their anti-transgender legislative agenda.”
It would constitute nothing short of unilateral campaign disarmament if Republican candidates for both houses of the Virginia General Assembly don’t turn Democrats’ reflexive opposition to those eminently sensible bills against them this fall.
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