As Gilmore Plays Santa, He Sets Up Warner for Role of Scrooge
The retiring Republican governor goes on an end-of-term spending spree to make his successor look like a tight-fisted Scrooge. And the emboldened speaker of the House of Delegates reconfigures his expanded GOP majority to maximize its strength in the General Assembly.</br></br>The Democratic governor-elect must watch where he treads after outgoing Gov. James S. Gilmore III and House Speaker S. Vance Wilkins Jr. are finished with their pre-inaugural maneuvers. The audacious governor has been merrily spending money he doesn't have, while the wily Wilkins is making it much easier for his GOP leadership team to exert even more control over state affairs.</br></br>Warner is outwardly unfazed by the Republican scheming, although he did flash a little exasperation Monday when Gilmore stepped all over his successor's story of the day -- naming Virginia's new Democratic education secretary -- by adding yet another item to his unusually long list of Christmas wishes.</br></br>That day, Gilmore was asking for passage of a constitutional amendment to erase the car tax from the books once and for all -- and to replace that $1 billion of annual income to localities with a permanent share of income taxes. It looked defensible on paper, but Warner and even some Republicans at the county level started asking tough questions right away about the long-term reliability of that funding to local governments.</br></br>The governor has been acting as though Jan. 12 is the start of his second term, not Warner's first. Armed with the magic credit card of state bonding capacity, Gilmore said he would include in his final budget tens of millions of additional dollars for historically black colleges, anti-terrorism plans, teacher raises and college construction. And then he dared to ask for what he called the "capstone" to car-tax relief, its permanent repeal in the form of a constitutional amendment.