GOP has biz, and a riddle

Presumptions that prevail tell us that when business calls, Democrats answer with hard flicks to the nose and Republicans with coos. So along comes the Virginia Foundation for Research and Economic Education providing in the form of legislative ratings a distillation of myths, some of which, it turns out, won’t bust.

For those preferring governance tilting toward the private sector, still the country’s primary job provider, Republicans retain allure. On a General Assembly scorecard released Tuesday by the Richmond-based economic education foundation, or Virginia FREE, GOP lawmakers are aces.

Atop the Senate leaderboard is local man Emmett Hanger, one of five Republicans with a record of voting 100 percent pro-business last year, according to Virginia FREE. Twenty percentage points behind the senator from Mount Solon is another familiar name, that of Creigh Deeds, the Bath County Democrat who swatted aside Terry McAuliffe last week to win the party nomination for governor.

Deeds defies partisan impressions, but only slightly. Another local lawmaker, Del. Steve Landes, a Weyers Cave Republican who is being challenged for the first time in more than a decade, scored no better than Deeds in the Virginia FREE ratings. A dozen GOP delegates scored worse. Deeds is the only area lawmaker listed as a patron of a bill the group supported, last year seeking to form a bipartisan redistricting commission, a move aimed at removing politics from the process and one that Republicans, hoping for the moment to retain the politics, opposed to their discredit.

In addition, Deeds was the lone Democrat to initially vote against a fat Senate tax package but swayed in 2004 to support the largest tax increase in state history. Further inspection further clouds his record. He voted in April for a Senate bill defeated in the lower chamber to tap federal stimulus money to expand unemployment benefits. The measure carried appeal amid the economic downturn, but left businesses on the hook after the stimulus well ran dry.

Republican gubernatorial contender Bob McDonnell, who scored 100 percent on the Virginia FREE ratings in 2005 as a delegate in his final year in the General Assembly, will spend the summer and fall depicting Deeds as a vintage tax-and-spender. Deeds, dutifully, has provided ammunition. Three times in recent years he has voted for gas tax increases, twice last summer while prices hovered at $4 a gallon. He repeatedly has backed increased cigarette taxes and opposed McDonnell’s move to eliminate the state death tax.

On two issues cited by Virginia FREE, energy and transportation, Deeds similarly follows the party drift. He proposes to spend $85 million on renewables, biofuels and mass transit, among other things. This is money in the wind. Until the cost of alternative energy is reduced and its capacity expanded, the juice will continue to flow from fossil fuels no matter how green blues like Deeds feel.

More complex is transportation, a subject on which Deeds won points from The Washington Post when the paper famously endorsed him in the party primary. His approach would, typically, cost taxpayers more money, as the newspaper explained with a spin: “Deeds courageously voted for a proposal that included raising the state’s gas tax.” Lexicographers should note the alteration in the definition of courage. And lawmakers, less of it, please.

How McDonnell would produce money for transportation fixes is murkier. Here’s the riddle that needs solving: how to unclog traffic in bustling Northern Virginia without bowing taxpayers’ backs to the point of breaking. Business purrs for McDonnell. But on hard questions about roads, while familiar drones hum in the Deeds camp, in McDonnell’s, only the crickets are talking.