A slew of proposals: From strange to popular

A lot of things have been said about Southern politics, and very few of them are nice. Last week the Virginia General Assembly flooded into Richmond, marking the beginning of the 2012 session. The bitterness and bickering began on the first day.

The Virginia General Assembly is the oldest legislative body in the Western Hemisphere and is structured similarly to Congress with a lower House of Delegates and an upper State Senate.

After elections last November, both chambers are under the control of the Republican Party. Virginia Gov. Robert "Bob" McDonnell, the well-coifed, walking stereotype of a Southern governor, now leads a one-party government.

After lawsuits, the Democratic Party of Virginia conceded Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling's tie-breaking vote in the State Senate and faded into powerless exile.

As is expected by a conservative government, gun controls will likely be loosened. Gun control advocates seek to make it illegal for a Virginia public college to prohibit faculty members from carrying guns on campus.

Advocates claim this is a reaction to the two recent shooting incidents at Virginia Tech. This would not affect the University of Richmond, which strictly bans any firearms on campus.

Another bill would end the licensure system in place for a concealed weapon, and allow anybody to carry one. Four more bills will try to remove Virginia's ban on Sunday hunting, an archaic remnant of the blue laws of the 1800s.

Social conservatives are ecstatic over the hegemony of a party sympathetic to their cause. Del. Bob Marshall, best known locally for his outrage over the display of a gay pride flag by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, made sure that his personhood bill was the first to be introduced. This bill would define embryos as having from the moment of conception "all the rights, privileges and immunities available to other persons," thus making abortion legally equivalent to homicide.

The delegate has changed few minds with his assertions that handicapped children born to mothers who previously had an abortion are God's revenge. However, Marshall's bill could find itself ignored by the governor, who has sought to preserve his nice-guy image for a possible vice presidential nomination. Advocates inspired by New York's legalization of marriage equality will find deaf ears and cold shoulders in Richmond this session.

Virginia's budget is decided every two years, and it must be balanced according to the state constitution. As raising taxes would get him booted out of the Republican Party, the governor must cut and rearrange the budget to satisfy as many people as he can with a growing, but still diminished revenue stream.

McDonnell's biggest priority is to repay the $620 million that he borrowed out of the Virginia Retirement System to balance his last budget, and to make up the more than $1 billion in shortfall stemming from the stock market downturn. He champions increasing funding toward K-12 public education by $438 million, but nearly 80 percent of that is simply to repay teachers' retirement plans.

McDonnell is seeking to reduce funding to education-related programs and "non-teaching expenses" by roughly $200 million. For higher education, the governor is offering tens of millions to public universities who jump through hoops to further increase their graduation rates and "efficiency." For private colleges such as Richmond, McDonnell is seeking a $100 increase in the Tuition Assistance Grant to Virginia residents (everybody else is out of luck there).

Lackluster is a nicer word to describe the condition of Virginia's roads. The governor wants to shift roughly $100 million of the state's sales tax revenue toward transportation; his critics note correctly that this would mean less funding to everything else. Although a more sensible move would be to increase the Virginia gas tax, now worth less than half of what it was when established in 1985 because of inflation, the governor will instead take funds from a tax that falls hardest on the poor, few of whom own cars.

Each new legislative session in Virginia also brings a slew of strange, humorous and far-fetched proposals by our lawmakers. Students who continually let their cellphones ring in class could face jail-time from a proposed law that would make it a crime to let a phone ring "with intent to annoy." To those not content to be put back into the earth, another bill would allow a tax credit for sending remains into space. Pretending to be a bigamist could become as illegal as actually being one.

The 2012 General Assembly session will be the last display of unity for the Republican Party of Virginia, before what is shaping up to be a divisive battle for the gubernatorial nomination. Though moderates will likely block the most radical legislation, Virginia is certainly shifting rightward. Locked out completely, the Democratic Party must wait for its messiah.