The Virginia Constitution places a single requirement on the General Assembly: the responsibility to pass a balanced biennial budget for the commonwealth. For the fourth time in the last 14 years, that task has proved too much for the 140 members of the state Senate and the House of Delegates.
Legislators adjourned the 2018 Assembly session with little to show for the 60 days they’ve been in Richmond. Budget conferees from the House and Senate — including Lynchburg’s Sen. Steve Newman and Del. Scott Garrett representing their respective chambers — talked and talked, but as the clock wound down, a budget deal was beyond them.
And if you guessed health care and Medicaid expansion were at the heart of the impasse, you guessed correctly. Though it’s the politics of this particular impasse that makes this budget debate interesting.
For the four years Democrat Terry McAuliffe was governor, Republicans in control of the Senate and House blocked any expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. They were wary of expanding coverage to recipients making 137 percent of the federal poverty limit, even with Washington paying 100 percent of the costs, at the time, with tax dollars Virginians were already sending to the federal government. Their rationale was that federal promises of long-term reimbursement of 90 percent of the costs were just that … promises, and the ACA itself could still be repealed if the GOP took back Congress and the White House.
That happened in 2014 (GOP control of Congress) and 2016 (Donald Trump elected president), but the ACA and Medicaid expansion, though weakened, remain very much alive.
But the 2017 state elections turned Richmond upside down and paved the way for Virginia’s latest budget impasse/crisis-in-the-making.
Besides sweeping all three statewide races, with Ralph Northam becoming governor, Democrats all but erased the GOP’s 66-seat majority in the House of Delegates, cutting the majority to a 51-49 Republican edge. And in poll after poll, health care concerns came in as one of voters’ biggest issues.
Kirk Cox, the new speaker of the House, and his fellow Republicans got the message loud and clear. He and Gov. Northam also seem to have hit it off much better personally than former House Speaker Bill Howell and McAuliffe ever did, and the two began talking about how Virginia could move forward on this contentious issue.
But the 21 Republican senators, who were not up for re-election last year, have proved to be the thorn in the side of their party comrades in the House. Led by Majority Leader Tommy Norment, who’s also the co-chairman of the powerful Finance Committee, they have steadfastly opposed the House’s expansion plans. And they’ve done so even though there’s a work requirement included and the expansion itself is modeled on how then-Gov. and now-Vice President Mike Pence pulled off Medicaid expansion in his home state of Indiana.
The result is two competing budgets that are as different as night and day … and more than $600 million apart.
The House’s budget includes Medicaid expansion, now with costs reimbursed at a 90 percent rate by Washington. The state dollars freed up by accepting federal expansion funds have been directed at a number of line items Republicans themselves admit have been shorted. There’s a major increase in funding for K-12 education in the state, which because of simple demographics greatly benefits schools in Northern Virginia and other population centers. Teachers and state employees see pay increases. And the commonwealth’s public colleges and universities would receive new state aid designed to bring down the costs to attend for middle-class Virginians.
The Senate budget, however, cuts more than $420 million from public safety, student aid, programs for public health and mental health and even reparations for a man wrongly convicted and imprisoned.
There are deadlines looming — off in the distance now, but creeping closer every day. Local school boards are required by law to adopt their budgets by May 1, and they have until April 15 to inform teachers whether their contracts will be renewed for the upcoming school year. Boards of supervisors and city councils must adopt their budgets by June 30 before the new fiscal year starts July 1, but before that, they must advertise the spending plan and the underlying tax rates twice and hold public hearings under a schedule laid out in the Code of Virginia.
In less than four weeks, legislators return to the Capitol for a special session on April 11, called for the explicit purpose of dealing with the budget impasse. Which chamber will prevail is anyone’s guess at this point, but as Del. Glenn Davis, a Virginia Beach Republican who reluctantly supported the House budget, said, “The problem we’re having, Mr. Speaker, is — well — elections have consequences.”
That they do.
