Virginia Gun Owners Forum - VGOF

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Tea Party targets budget, Dems' gun bill tactics
By BOB LEWIS AP Political Writer
March 8, 2010

RICHMOND, Va. - Six days from adjourning the 2010 General Assembly, the partisan and ideological rhetoric on Monday was the most bare-knuckled since the General Assembly convened, highlighting deep divides playing out not only in the state capital but in Congress.

Conservative Tea Party activists assailed Democratic budgeting and tactics for bottling up pro-gun bills while Democrats railed against a hard right turn by Gov. Bob McDonnell and the Republicans.

About 300 people calling for balancing the new state budget solely through more than $2 billion in cuts rallied Monday on the Capitol lawn. The speakers, all leaders or members of Virginia's growing Tea Party movement, assailed the health care plan now before Congress and the legislature's efforts to levy millions of dollars in new fees to deal with a budget shortfall.

"Please join us. We know the enemy. We know who they are," Tito Munoz told the crowd of activists, many holding green and gold signs urging Virginia lawmakers to balance the budget through spending cuts alone.

Joe Guarino, who oversees legislative issues for the Richmond Tea Party, focused the crowd on Sen. Henry Marsh, D-Richmond, who has bottled up several pro-gun bills in the Senate Courts Committee he chairs.

He told the crowd to pressure Marsh to release House Bill 69, a measure by Del. Charles W. "Bill" Carrico that would allow residents to build firearms--including superguns--not regulated by federal law if they are constructed solely in Virginia and are never sold or moved outside the state. He called the bill a state sovereignty issue.

"This is a 10th Amendment bill. It's a bill to let the federal government know what their limitations are," Guarino said.

Inside the House and Senate chambers, which have been in session since Jan. 13, the mood was equally abrasive.

As the House advanced bills to accommodate online virtual schools and university-run laboratory schools, Del. Lionel Spruill rose and accused the governor, the GOP and some fellow Democrats of gutting money for public schools to benefit private education vendors.

"Why don't we shut down the public schools? We don't need no public schools now. We've got three new schools--charter schools, virtual schools and laboratory schools," Spruill said.

"Right now, because Bob McDonnell wants them, y'all are giving it to him. Bob McDonnell is selling out our kids," he said. "He's selling out as well because he does not care about the kids who are at risk. He does not care about poor kids and those of you who vote for these bills, including Republicans and Democrats, you don't care about them either."

Later, Sen. A. Donald McEachin said that the socially conservative vision that McDonnell outlined in a college thesis he wrote 21 years ago is coming to pass.

He made the remarks in criticizing McDonnell's refusal to renew job protections for gay state workers, as his two Democratic predecessors had done. He also referred to orders Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli gave to state-supported colleges to rescind campus bans against discrimination based on sexual orientation.

McEachin said voters were foretold of a hard right turn on moral issues in August when The Washington Post disclosed the thesis McDonnell wrote in 1989 for a law and master of public policy degree from Pat Robertson's Regent University in Virginia Beach. The paper asserted that discrimination against gays and other groups is acceptable for the benefit of straight, married couples.

During last fall's campaign, Democratic nominee R. Creigh Deeds called the treatise McDonnell's blueprint for governing. McDonnell effectively dismissed it as a long-ago academic exercise that belied his record of hiring women to senior positions as attorney general.

"Much was made of my party bringing up the thesis. We were blamed for focusing on that issue. But ... make no mistake about it, we are living the thesis. We are being driven by the thesis. The thesis now has form, the thesis now has a body, the thesis is now a reality in Virginia," McEachin said.

McDonnell spokesman J. Tucker Martin dismissed Spruill's remarks as "tremendously disappointing." And he noted that charter schools have the support of Democratic President Barack Obama.

Of McEachin's comments, Martin said McDonnell has worked since taking office on economic development and "to create an atmosphere of civility and cooperation. Comments like these don't help."


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