A new chamber for legislation execution

The General Assembly is a giant petri dish for bad ideas. The only thing surprising about the latest contagion is that it took so long to spread. Four years ago, House Speaker Bill Howell gave subcommittees the power to kill bills without a hearing before a full panel. That meant bills endorsed by a majority of the state Senate could be obliterated by as few as four delegates.

Senators fumed. What an insult! What a blight on democracy! What a... great idea!

So now "killer" subcommittees are proliferating like paramecia all over Capitol Square, nibbling away at bills large and small. Senators created a special "miscellaneous" subcommittee to kill a bill that would have prohibited employers from implanting microchips in their workers' molars.

Yes, it was a silly bill, but that was just a warm-up. Senators graduated to the big time this week with the creation of a special subcommittee for gun bills. The panel rejected a variety of firearms bills Thursday afternoon, including one that would have repealed a law limiting individuals to the purchase of one handgun a month. At times, only two of the five subcommittee members were present; others left proxy votes so they could attend other meetings.

The subcommittee was designed to serve as a circuit breaker in a legislature that has gone gaga over Glocks. Speaker Howell felt it important to limit study commissions but allowed delegates to pass at least 16 gun measures, most of them relaxing existing legal restrictions.

Many of the senior Democrats who control the Senate hail from rural counties and were reluctant to call for a cease-fire. For the past eight years, those senators could count on a veto from the governor. With Gov. Bob McDonnell in the executive mansion, Senate Democrats have a problem. They don't want to kill gun bills, but they don't want to let them pass. The subcommittee offered an out.

Did the ends justify the means? Isn't a little less democracy better than a lot more bullets? Actually, no. Once the democratic process is corrupted, the scourge cannot be contained.

The gun bill subcommittee is a case in point. It was created to put a lid on unwise firearm measures, but senators tucked an ethics bill into its docket. The measure would have banned legislators or anyone in their law firms from serving as commissioners of accounts, a lucrative job overseeing estates.

Commissioners are hired by judges, who in turn are chosen by legislators, so it's a clear conflict. Only one commissioner currently serves in the General Assembly, and it's no coincidence that he's a senator - Tommy Norment of James City County.

Norment's colleagues don't want to deprive him of his income, but they were embarrassed to vote against such a common sense ethics bill. So it died at the hands of a few volunteers while a majority of senators maintained their precious plausible deniability.

This is how House leaders blocked passage of a smoking ban in restaurants for years despite overwhelming public demand. It's the reason why Virginia still allows its legislators to draw their own districts and suppress competitive elections.

Voters didn't elect legislators to come to Richmond and concoct schemes for avoiding tough votes. Allowing subcommittees to kill bills was a bad idea in the House, and it's a bad idea in the Senate as well. This is a plague that needs to be exterminated from both wings of the Capitol.