Virginia GOP Seeks a Huge Leap Backwards

Shortly, a slate of Republican extremists will be sworn in in as Virginia's governor, Lt. governor and attorney general.  Glenn Youngkin ran a stealth campaign pretending to be a moderate while swearing fealty to far right Christofascists groups and has now nominated far right exrtremists to numerous positions.  Winsome Sears, the new Lt. Governor is, in my view batshit crazy - she was nuts years ago and has gone further off the deep end over time.  The new Attorney General is an ideologue and has an anti-gay history.  Years of progress which transformed Virginia into the most progressive state of the Old South and made the state attractive to new businesses - e.g., Amazon's second headquarters - will be under attack as this triumverate of extremists, aided by the now GOP controlled House of Delegates seek to undo progressive legislation.  One can only hope the coming overreach and deference to religious extremists and racists - now a key constituency of the Virginia GOP - will so shock suburban voters that the 2023 elections will see Republicans lose seats in both the Virginia Senate and House of Delegates. Two pieces in the Washington Post look at early efforts to take Virginia backwards and threaten the health and safety of Virginians.  The first looks at proposed GOP legislation. Here are highlights:

With hundreds of bills already filed, Republicans were clearly hoping to roll back much of what Democrats muscled through in the past two years, looking well beyond the “kitchen-table” issues that Youngkin and incoming House Speaker Todd Gilbert (R-Shenandoah) have called priorities.

Among the GOP bills are those to: prohibit local governments from banning guns from parks and government buildings; cancel a minimum wage hike — from $11 an hour to $12 — that’s scheduled to take effect next year; require women seeking an abortion to sign a written consent; require voters to show photo ID at the polls; cut the early-voting period from 45 days to 14 days; and repeal a state law requiring local school boards to follow the state’s lead on transgender-rights policies.

Democrats seemed eager to flex what remains of their political muscle on some fronts. They were threatening to defeat Youngkin’s nomination of Andrew Wheeler — a former coal lobbyist who was President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency chief — for secretary of natural resources. Cabinet confirmations are typically mere formalities in Richmond, where a governor’s pick hasn’t been defeated since 2006.

Youngkin announced his 13th and perhaps final Cabinet nominee late Monday afternoon. He has not nominated a chief diversity officer, a Cabinet-level post Northam created in the aftermath of a blackface scandal in early 2019. Youngkin transition aide said the incoming governor “will have announcements on that office in the near term.” He declined to elaborate.

Don't be surprised if the diversity officer position remains unfilled or is abolished to appease the racist GOP party base.  Of equal concern is Youngkin's likely undermining of measures to deal with Covid-19 that have helped Virginia fare better than other states in the Old South.  The second piece in the Post looks at this troubling situation:

Last week, Mr. Youngkin and the state’s attorney general-elect, Republican Jason Miyares, who take office Saturday, announced Virginia will join the legal challenges to the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates “to protect Virginians’ freedoms.” They did so even as the coronavirus pandemic drove hospital admissions so high that the current governor, Democrat Ralph Northam, declared a 30-day state of emergency on Monday.

[T]he issue raised by the governor-elect is about messaging. By attacking vaccine mandates at this critical time, Mr. Youngkin threatens to reverse the gains against the pandemic in Virginia, which has one of the nation’s highest vaccination rates, and, consequently, one of the lowest per capita death rates from covid-19.

It’s no coincidence that counties that voted heavily for Donald Trump, who has also opposed vaccine mandates, suffer far worse covid-19 death rates than counties that supported Joe Biden. An analysis by NPR showed that covid-19 deaths per capita since May 2021, when vaccines became widely available, are nearly three times higher in counties where Mr. Trump won 60 percent or more of the vote than in counties won by Mr. Biden.

Mr. Youngkin has supported vaccinations as key to combating the coronavirus. But his framing has rendered his own vaccine advocacy toothless. . . . . That rhetoric will only encourage anti-vaxxers to continue resisting the best anti-covid weapon science has devised.

Here’s a question for the governor-elect: Since when have “Virginians’ freedoms,” which he said should trump vaccine mandates, given license to endanger the lives of others in a pandemic that will likely have taken the lives of some 1 million Americans by the time Mr. Youngkin’s first year in office is finished?

Here’s another: Will Mr. Youngkin, once in office, also oppose the state’s own vaccine mandates for children and teenagers attending schools in Virginia? Included here: shots for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis; the meningococcal conjugate vaccine; the human papillomavirus vaccine; the hepatitis B vaccine; the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine; the haemophilus influenzae type B vaccine; the pneumococcal vaccine; the rotavirus vaccine; the polio vaccine; the varicella vaccine; and the hepatitis A vaccine. By Mr. Youngkin’s reasoning, shouldn’t those public health interventions also be left up to individual Virginians?

Perhaps the greater peril posed by his messaging is that it will subvert Virginia’s fight against the pandemic, led by Mr. Northam, who favors vaccine mandates. Just nine states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia have lower covid-19 per capita death rates than the commonwealth, and in only eight states is a greater percentage of the population fully vaccinated.

Expect the next two years to be a nightmare for sane, non-extremist Virginians.