Everyone prepare yourselves for some shocking news.
It turns out that the aw-shucks, dorky-dad-in-an-REI-fleece persona Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has cultivated has not distracted people from noticing that he’s a standard-issue private equity goblin with a reactionary mean streak. Particularly the Democrats who control both houses of the state Legislature, whose icy contempt for the empty-headed weasel dick seems to know no bounds.
The Democrats recently helped kill Youngkin’s big, legacy-defining project: a sports and entertainment complex in Northern Virginia that would have included a new home arena for basketball’s Washington Wizards and hockey’s Washington Capitols. Youngkin then vetoed a whole bunch of bills that might have made life marginally easier and more humane for his constituents. The system works! By not working!
First, the arena project, which had the enthusiastic support of Ted Leonsis, the billionaire owner of the Caps and Wizards, and hardly anyone else:
Though some House Democrats initially voted for the arena, the project was unpopular in Alexandria and never built a strong constituency in the General Assembly, where even some Republicans did not support it.
Yeah, the people in Alexandria were not thrilled about, among other issues, increasing traffic in an area where the roads are already a parking lot even at the best of times. And no one could avoid noticing that these arena projects often give sweet financial breaks to the billionaire owners of sports teams while never producing the high number of jobs and economic growth that their advocates promise.
So Leonsis abandoned the project and struck a deal to keep the Wizards and Caps in Washington DC, a city that also has plenty of problems that need addressing but also doesn’t have a legislature that pays attention to its needs. (It has Congress instead.)
As the Speaker of Virginia’s House, Don Scott, told the Washington Post:
“I think leadership matters and style matters, and we did not have the leadership and style that it takes to get a project like that done with so much at stake.”
Just once, we’d like it if wealthy dilettantes like Youngkin would recognize that being a successful CEO of something like The Carlyle Group, where you only have to measure yourself against other sociopaths in your industry, is completely different from running a state with a co-equal branch of government. Which means that the ego stroking has to go both ways if you want to get anything accomplished.
Not to worry, though. Youngkin has gotten revenge this week by vetoing a whole bunch of bills for things that people like:
HB 698 and SB 448 aimed to establish a retail market for marijuana starting in May 2025. HB 1 and SB 1 would have increased the state’s minimum wage from $12 per hour to $13.50 at the start of the new year and $15 per hour starting in 2026. Both passed the House and Senate by tight margins.
Presumably a lot of the jobs at Youngkin’s hoped-for complex would have been low-wage positions like selling beer and Alex Ovechkin jerseys. Maybe he could have made a deal here: Fund my project and all the Virginians who work at it can have higher wages!
Or maybe the project was always doomed because Youngkin, the guy who infamously claimed to have gotten through high school while working as a dishwasher to help his family, is a wealthy ghoul with little empathy for anyone in a lower tax bracket.
LIKE SO!
At least Youngkin is consistent: He also vetoed a bill that would have extended minimum-wage protections to farmworkers, including migrants on temporary visas who often see their labor exploited for poverty wages. Money perhaps driving growth by circulating in the economy? Why do that when the Tyson executives who run the chicken-slaughtering plant on the Eastern Shore want to put another wing on their houses?
Youngkin was also very busy vetoing a whole shitload of gun safety laws, so at least everyone in Virginia will have an easier time shooting each other:
Youngkin vetoed 30 bills, including ones to restrict assault weapons access, impose waiting periods to receive a gun after purchasing one, expand the definition of people convicted of domestic abuse who are prevented from having a gun to include intimate partners, ban guns in more public places and conduct a study on the effects of gun violence.
Our illustrious governor also vetoed bills that would have required a waiting period before buying a gun, training law enforcement officers on enforcing the state’s red flag law, and outlining certain safe storage requirements for keeping guns in a house where minors are present.
That last one is particularly ironic, since he also signed a bill that “would create a felony charge for parents or guardians who allow a child under 18 to access a firearm despite knowing the child has a history of violent or threatening behavior.” So people don’t have to store their firearms safely, and we’re not going to give them advice on how to do so if they want to, but we’re going to charge them with felonies if a minor in their home gets a gun and shoots someone anyway.
Remember when people read too much into Youngkin’s 2021 election and started whispering that maybe he could challenge Donald Trump for the 2024 presidential nomination? And they did this while he was busy caving to the crazy wing of the GOP — that is to say, the GOP — by rolling back voting rights for convicted felons, pushing for harsh limits on abortion, and kicking transgender students right in the teeth? That was funny. Not like ha-ha funny, but more like “You people are such cruel fucking morons” funny.
Luckily Youngkin is term-limited, so we just have to white-knuckle our way through two more years of his extreme lame duckness, and then maybe we can vote in a governor who is not such a floppy-haired rat scrotum. Here’s hoping.
[Washington Post / Virginian-Pilot / Virginia Mercury]
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