When Gov. Abigail Spanberger sent back amendments on some bills to the General Assembly, Democratic legislators balked. Considering the governor’s extensive amendments to be wholesale rewrites of the legislation, the General Assembly simply didn’t vote on her proposed changes and sent the original bills back to her — take it or leave it.
When Spanberger started to veto some of those bills, starting with collective bargaining, Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell said the legislature felt “blindsided” with gubernatorial amendments. “The governor proposed an entirely new bill,” he said. “That’s not really how the legislative process works.”
When Spanberger later vetoed the cannabis legislation bill, part of a “Tuesday Afternoon Massacre” of vetoes, a Republican legislator texted me to say: “I don’t know what to make of this governor.”
Later, as some progressive groups held protests against Spanberger’s vetoes, one liberal activist in Roanoke posted on social media: “Am I reading the news right: the new Democrat in Virginia is pro-ICE, pro-cop, anti-weed, and anti-union?”
Those kinds of questions and reactions led me last week to the Wolf Hills coffee shop in downtown Abingdon, where I sat in the alcove in the back. Across the table from me was the governor herself, who was eager to talk about her decisions so far and a governing style that has left Democrats such as Surovell, in his words, “dismayed and perplexed.”
I recited some of these complaints to our 75th governor and asked her about them, particularly those from fellow Democrats who are confused by her actions. Spanberger’s response: “I think I’m really consistent. They say the devil’s in the details, so I pay attention to the details. I care about the details. I’m highly engaged on policies that I’m going to be responsible for implementing” — and that’s what led to some key vetoes. She objected to the details of the legislation before her.
That reference to the details was a theme that ran through our interview. Spanberger emphasized repeatedly that she will be the one responsible for implementing these policies, so she wants to make sure the details are right because any mistakes will rebound to her administration. Some of these policy changes, such as legalizing cannabis sales, are so weighty, she said, that a delay in implementation is worth it to get those details right. “Do people want me to sign a bill or do people want me to get it right?” she asked. “As the person implementing that, what’s most important to me is to get it right.”
These are things often hard to explain to impatient party activists. “There are always lessons to be learned, and I think there were places in my support for the principle of a policy or an end goal, I suppose that perhaps I should have said with every chance I support the principle of this policy,” she said. Of course, what many people just see is the headline: “Spanberger vetoes collective bargaining” or “Spanberger vetoes cannabis sales.”
Another theme that ran through the interview: If she’s not supposed to take time to review bills and send back amendments where she thinks appropriate, why does the constitution give her that power?
“In the process we have in Virginia, the governor has the option of signing, vetoing or amending. And if I wasn’t supposed to take that option of amending seriously, it wouldn’t be an option in our process,” she said. Spanberger made it clear she takes that power of amending seriously.
Just as she repeated the phrase “the devil’s in the details” later in our interview, the governor’s power to propose amendments — and her intention to use it — was a theme Spanberger returned to several times during our interview. She also said that some legislators have told her privately that some of the conflict between the General Assembly and the new governor could be due to resentment on the part of some legislators at having to deal with a woman in the role of chief executive for the first time.
I’ve interviewed multiple governors over the years. This was by far the most substantive conversation I’ve ever had with any of them. I found our talk substantive enough that I’ll be breaking it into three parts. Today, we’ll look at Spanberger’s governing style. On Thursday, data centers and the budget. On Friday, the cannabis veto. Here are the highlights of what Spanberger had to say about her governance thus far.
Spanberger: Democrats aren’t accustomed to a Democratic governor questioning a Democratic legislature
Spanberger vetoed 31 bills passed by a Democratic General Assembly. The last time we had a Democratic trifecta — a Democrat as governor and Democratic control in both houses of the legislature — was during Ralph Northam’s final two years. He vetoed four bills over the span of that time. That would seem to make Spanberger an outlier, but she offers this historical perspective: Those years coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. “There’s a public health crisis and then a related economic crisis. So even the last time that there was this type of trifecta, things were monumentally different,” she said. (What she didn’t mention: Northam, in his final two years, was hobbled by the fallout from the “blackface” scandal and wasn’t in a political position to challenge the legislature on many issues they wanted.)
Before those final two years of Northam’s term, you have to go back to Douglas Wilder, elected in 1989, to find a Democratic trifecta — and that was a very different era in Virginia politics, with a far more moderate legislature (and some Democrats in the General Assembly who could still qualify as conservatives). In those days, there were often conflicts between a Democratic governor and the legislature (particularly strong-minded Senate Finance chairs such as Ed Willey and Hunter Andrews). Just because there’s a governor and legislature of the same party now, Spanberger asked, “Does that mean that I’m supposed to just accept and sign any bill?”
In effect, she’s saying: Previous Democratic governors vetoed bills passed by a Democratic legislature, so this is nothing new. It’s easy to blame any conflict now on Spanberger’s inexperience in Richmond. However, relations between Wilder and the General Assembly were particularly contentious, even though he had served in the legislature for a decade and a half before winning statewide office.
In 1991, then-Gov. Wilder made headlines when he struck from the budget a spending item of particular importance to Andrews, who was the Louise Lucas of his day. Wilder cited the line-item veto as responsible governance at a time when other budgets were being tightened. Others saw removing the $140,000 appropriation to equip a replica of one of the first ships to arrive at Jamestown as a petty move by the governor. The Senate responded by passing a measure intended to curb gubernatorial power.
Spanberger: Collective bargaining was a “moving target”
The first veto that drew widespread protests was the governor’s veto of the bill to expand collective bargaining to many state and local employees. This is where Spanberger said she could have done a better job expressing her support for the goal, while having reservations about the details. “Even on the last day of session, there were two different conference reports on the public sector collective bargaining bill that came,” she said. “So that was a moving target. That bill was changing every step of the way, which is again the prerogative of the legislature.”
Spanberger also said the bill, as passed, did not sufficiently address the concerns of local governments (Surovell’s view is that local governments bypassed the legislature and went straight to the governor with their complaints, thereby complicating the process). “But then of course I was going to go through it really line by line with an eye towards questions that localities [have] and are their concerns answered in this bill,” she said. “Are there ways that I can provide greater clarity? And that’s what I put forth in my amendments.”
From her point of view, the process of expanding collective bargaining is a potentially complicated one; legislators see it as much simpler. That seems part of the conflict between the two — and fits within Spanberger’s worldview of focusing on the details. Later, when discussing cannabis, Spanberger went into great length about how if she’s supposed to carry out the implementation, she wants to be sure nothing goes wrong — presumably the same logic on her part would apply to collective bargaining as well. From her point of view, better to wait than not do it right. Of course, legislators would likely say they had it right the first time, but they don’t get the final word (unless they have the votes to override a veto, which they don’t).
Spanberger: She can’t say gender is a factor, but others have told her it is
I asked Spanberger — our first woman to serve as governor — if she felt gender was a factor in any of the problems she’s had with the legislature.
“I would say I don’t know and I can’t say that definitively. I will say that quite a few legislators who have privately spoken to me with outrage about conversations they’ve been a part of, or things they have heard, believe that’s the case,” she said.
That was intended to be the final question to our interview — her press secretary had already signaled that our time was up — but the governor had more to say. “I think what I have found interesting is I am surprised by the degree to which people think that I wouldn’t take the entirety of my role as seriously as I have taken several other roles in my life,” she said. “And maybe that’s gendered on my part, whereas, whether it was in federal law enforcement or CIA, I only once ever worked with another woman case officer who was married when I was out in the field. I never worked with another woman case officer who had children out in the field. They exist, sprinkled around the world. I had to work hard. I had to be perfect. I had to be intentional. I had to bring something to bear.”
Now that she’s governor, “I’m the head of the executive branch, and so I have to have a strong cabinet focused on state agencies and the basic function of government, and then I have this role where I have to review policy, sign off on it or submit amendments. I’m not sure why anyone thought I would suddenly decide that, yeah, I’ll just sit back and sign, because I wouldn’t be governor if that were how I did things. And if I bowed to pressure and people trying to push me this way or that way, I wouldn’t be governor.”
Spanberger: Vetoes overshadow all the things she and the General Assembly have accomplished
Spanberger is hardly the first politician to think accomplishments are being overshadowed by controversies. “I’m really proud of so many of the bills — the hundreds upon hundreds of bills that aren’t really getting the attention. Lots of people voted for them, I signed them and they will monumentally impact people’s lives, but that may not be the most notable or melodramatic of my actions,” Spanberger said. “I mean everything from really monumental things like paid family and medical leave, capping insulin prices, to heavily supporting a locality’s ability to be able to build more housing. All of those priorities are really impactful, so that’s what I’m proud of.”
Later, she went on to talk about how she signed the legislation that makes Virginia the second state in the country to allow “balcony solar,” small solar units for the home. At the ceremonial bill signing in Charlottesville recently, she said she had read about that concept in a Washington Post story last summer while still a candidate. She called Surovell to get his thoughts; he had read the same story and was working on drafting a bill. She also mentioned other bills, such as the one that removes the requirement for prior authorization before a patient visits a specialist, which she says will be particularly important to patients in rural areas. “It’s hard enough to get a doctor’s appointment,” Spanberger said. “When you have to travel further for specialists, those prior authorizations just become more and more onerous and more and more expensive. These are things that are going to change people’s lives, and the fact that we’re going to be taking a little longer about how do you set up a retail cannabis market — I don’t see that as a negative.”
She noted that her term runs four years, so she has time to wait to get the details of some bills in a place she’s comfortable with. “I personally don’t think I’m all that confusing.”
Coming Thursday: Spanberger on data centers and the budget.
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