We’ve launched a podcast. Episode 1 is a preview of the General Assembly session.
Richmond’s water crisis is the top political story of the week. It’s also a good learning moment for all of us. Legislators gaveled in for a brief session Wednesday and then adjourned until Monday, when they hope the water is back on. Why did they have to even gavel in? Because the state constitution says so. Article IV, Section 6, plainly states: “The General Assembly shall meet once each year on the second Wednesday in January.”
Why does it say that? This ultimately goes back to our Colonial experience, when the king summoned Parliament at his leisure, and sometimes that meant he didn’t summon it at all. King Charles I (who later lost his head, literally) went from 1629 to 1640 without convening Parliament at all. Our founders were intent on making sure that never happened, and this is the modern-day result of that.
The U.S. Constitution specifies: “The Congress shall assemble at least once in every year …” Our state constitution likewise requires the legislature to meet once a year, whether the governor likes it or not.
The unhappy experience with the high-handed Stuart kings (of which Charles I was just one) informed the American experiment in self-government in other ways. After that long parliamentary absence came what’s known as The Long Parliament, which lasted from 1640 to 1660 without an election in between. Imagine today a U.S. Congress or a Virginia legislature whose members were the ones elected back in 2005. Some former legislators who lost reelection over the past two decades might like that, but I suspect voters wouldn’t. Eventually the British Parliament, unhappy about that earlier long parliamentary absence, passed a law requiring the body to meet at least once every three years. Still, Parliament had to be called into session by the monarch, and for four years King Charles II simply did not.
That’s why our founders were keen to write a requirement that the legislature meet into the constitution; no enabling legislation or act of a potentially hostile chief executive was needed. The legislature isn’t allowed to meet; it’s required to meet.
Even today, some parliamentary democracies allow for their parliaments to be “prorogued,” which basically means they can’t meet for a time. In Canada, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is on the way out, Trudeau has prorogued, or suspended, parliamentary sessions until March 24 to give his party time to pick a successor. That also conveniently means the current government won’t suffer a vote of no confidence in the interim that would force a quicker election than the one Canada will eventually have.
The politics of England in the 1600s influenced our founders in another way. In 1688, Britain underwent more political turmoil. James II, the last of the Stuart kings, was chased out into permanent exile. Replacing him on the throne was his niece and her husband — the couple we now remember as William and Mary. The details behind what came to be known as “the Glorious Revolution” are complicated and involve both politics (the Stuarts were considered somewhat tyrannical) and religion (James II was Catholic), but you can go Google all that. What matters for us is that the Glorious Revolution a) reduced the power of the monarch and b) elevated the power of parliament and c) resulted in the English Bill of Rights, which spelled out for the first time, well, people’s rights. When American Colonists started protesting against London in the 1700s, their complaint was that the British Parliament was denying them their “rights as Englishmen” under that English Bill of Rights. When Americans finally declared independence, it was because they felt the British Parliament had no intention of upholding those rights, so they would do it themselves. If you compare the English Bill of Rights with our own (and other parts of our Constitution), you’ll find a lot of similar themes and language — among them, the right to bear arms, prohibitions against “cruel and unusual” punishments, and a right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
In some cases, our founders decided to strengthen what they considered vague language in the English Bill of Rights. For instance, the sentence “Parliaments ought to be held frequently” turned into required annual meetings of Congress. And, in our case here in Virginia, the General Assembly.
That English Bill of Rights still runs through much of our law. In 2016, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe couldn’t issue a blanket restoration of rights to convicted felons, he had to do it felon by felon. In the court’s ruling, then-Chief Justice Donald Lemons dismissed the governor’s arguments as “modern examples of the kind of regal excesses condemned by the English Bill of Rights following the Glorious Revolution in 1688.”
So, you thought this was just a water crisis? No, it’s a constitutional lesson. But wait, there’s more!
The historical lessons (and the Lynchburg connections) in Richmond’s first water supply
Many legislators and state officials joked about how they’d been thrown back in time. If there are ghosts of 18th- and 19th-century legislators still lurking around the Capitol, they might be surprised that their modern-day counterparts couldn’t function without something they never had: running water. Some private companies attempted some early water systems in Richmond in the 1800s, according to the website Waterworks History. In 1829, the city attempted to build its own water system and called upon the German-born engineer Albert Stein.
Encyclopedia Alabama says that there were few civil engineers in the U.S. at the time, so the country often turned to European ones (an early echo of the H-1B visa situation I wrote about earlier this week).
One of those European engineers was the French-born Claudius Crozet, who came to the U.S. to teach at West Point and then was hired away by the Virginia Board of Public Works (a forerunner of today’s Department of Transportation) to oversee the construction of bridges, canals, tunnels and railroads, including the Blue Ridge Tunnel through the mountain under Rockfish Gap. He later went on to teach at Virginia Military Institute; the community of Crozet in Albemarle County is named in his honor.
Another European engineer who played a key role in Virginia was Stein.
“Building water works to provide cleaner drinking water became Stein’s principal occupation and an area where he distinguished himself nationally and even internationally,” Encyclopedia Alabama says. He designed the first municipal water system in Cincinnati, then moved to Petersburg, “where he deepened the tidal section of the Appomattox River to improve shipping.” Then it was on to Lynchburg, where he served as water works engineer from 1828 to 1830. In Lynchburg, he “designed a reservoir that was filled by pumping water from the James River to a point 245 feet above the river level and then distributing water throughout the city via gravity.”
After that, he was hired by Richmond, where he built what’s been described as “the nation’s first water filtration system,” one of the few in the world at the time. “Pumps fed James River water to a series of three gravel-and-sand-lined reservoirs that could hold more than a million gallons each; the turbid river water percolated through the filtering system, removing unwanted river sediment,” Encyclopedia Alabama says. Even then, the system ultimately served just 345 homes. Stein went on to water-related jobs in Nashville, Tennessee; New York; New Orleans; and Mobile, Alabama.
The first governor with running water was from Wytheville
Richmond didn’t really get water on a widespread basis until 1924, when its water treatment plant was built. “Before then,” the city’s website says, “more than 300 years ago, Richmond’s drinking water came from numerous springs and an open stream flowing from the Capitol across Main Street.”
That means the first governor to get running water was Elbert Lee Trinkle of Wytheville, who was elected in 1922.
OK, enough history. On to the present day:
The political implications of the water crisis
Many Republicans are blaming the situation on … former Richmond Mayor LeVar Stoney, a Democrat, who is now seeking his party’s nomination for lieutenant governor. Some have called the photos of porta-potties outside the Capitol “Stoneyhenge.” Their rationale: Stoney didn’t invest enough in the city’s infrastructure. Is that fair? Is it really his fault or does America generally underinvest in infrastructure? That would require more technical information than I have seen. All I know is that politics can often be unfair. However, I suspect lots of mayors across Virginia right now are checking on their water systems.
The numbers behind this week’s special elections
In this week’s edition of West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter, I take a closer look at Tuesday’s special elections that filled three vacancies in the General Assembly.
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