The Senate has rules based on the idea that it was a chamber of gentlemen who would find ways to work together. But now, 41 Senators belong to a party that has no interest in a working government, no desire to work with the majority in good faith.
If Creigh Deeds loses today—and few candidates have hoisted themselves out of the kind of hole he’s dug—let it be known that the Commonwealth of Virginia missed out on having a very nice man in Richmond.
“When you elect a governor, you elect not only their positions, but you elect their character, their heart,” declared Senator Mark Warner, to a gamely cheering crowd of about 150 in Alexandria’s Market Square last night. “This is a good man, a man who has served Virginia and Virginians with distinction.”
“I think there’s something to be said for having a little emotion,” said the state’s other senator, Jim Webb, on Deeds’ well-known sensitivity.
The current governor Tim Kaine then explained that each of his three children in the page program at the Virginia state senate had picked Deeds as his or her favorite senator at the end of the session. “Somebody who is in a high and exalted position, who will take the time to make an impression upon a young person, that’s my kind of person,” Kaine effused. “I know his heart, I know his character, and character counts at the end of the day.”
As the state’s Democratic firmament praised Deeds, the candidate stood off to the side of the stage, smiling, not talking to anyone. When Kaine called him up onstage, Deeds approached people in at the border of the crowd and started hugging and handshaking. Those he made contact with seemed more surprised than anything else to find themselves being embraced by the gangly Deeds; he comes off more like a man pretending to be a candidate than the real thing.
How many of you knew that, if a convicted felon dies while his (or her) case is pending appeal, standard operating procedure is for the person's record to be expunged?
Somehow I missed this legal practice, known as abatement, until it received fresh attention this month with the death of a 71-year-old Virignia man serving time for incest. The first WaPo piece on the subject was written with the assumption that, following his December death from pancreatic cancer, James Bevel's case would be dismissed in accordance with years of federal precedent. But, latching on to a couple of legal technicalities, a Loudon County judge ruled Thursday that the abatement hearing would not proceed apace.
In its extraordinary decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health last month, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that a prohibition on same-sex marriage violates the Massachusetts constitution. While the court drew some support from federal precedents, its decision was plainly grounded in previous interpretations of the state constitution and its distinctive guarantees of equality and liberty. The U.S. Constitution was not involved; it was state--not federal--law that formed the basis for this ruling.
In the next two weeks, the Supreme Court will rule, in Lawrence v. Texas, on the constitutionality of Texas's law criminalizing consensual homosexual sodomy. The case involves the arrests and convictions of John Lawrence and Tyron Garner, who were discovered having sex in Lawrence's bedroom when police responded to a false report by a neighbor that a man was "going crazy" in the apartment. The two men were arrested, convicted, fined, and jailed.
