Youngkin doesn’t rule out rare budget veto as Va. deadline looms Monday

“I hope that doesn’t happen,” House Speaker Don L. Scott Jr. (D-Portsmouth) said in an interview Friday with The Washington Post. “I think it [a shutdown] would hurt our Triple-A bond rating, first, which would cost Virginians money because the cost of debt would go up. Also the services we rely on — law enforcement, teachers, transportation, courts — nobody would be getting paid. I’m hopeful that won’t happen and we can come to a resolution.”

The fact that both a full-budget veto and shutdown are even in the conversation signals the disconnect that remains between Youngkin and Democrats, who control both the House of Delegates and the Senate. Separated by a gulf on taxes, aggravated by harsh partisan rhetoric, the governor and lawmakers reached full breakdown last month with the failure of Youngkin’s plan to bring a $2 billion publicly-financed sports arena for the Washington Wizards and Capitals to Alexandria.

Along the way, Youngkin has been rolling out vetoes of Democratic priorities at a record-breaking pace, killing 112 bills so far, including those that would have raised the minimum wage, tightened gun control and set up a legal marketplace for recreational marijuana. He has until 11:59 p.m. Monday to take action on the budget and any other bills passed during the regular legislative session.

Late Friday night, Youngkin announced that he vetoed two nearly identical bills aimed at protecting out-of-state women who come to Virginia for a legal abortion and the health-care professionals who provide that abortion. The measures would prevent them from being extradited to another state where the procedure is illegal.

“This bill is aimed at medical professionals from other states who may be in Virginia and subject to an extradition,” Youngkin wrote in veto statements for both bills, which warned the measures threatened to disrupt interstate extradition agreements nationwide if states were to “carve out crimes … because of differing political positions.”

The bill sponsors — Del. Marcus B. Simon (D-Fairfax) and Sen. Barbara A. Favola (D-Arlington) — said Youngkin was mischaracterizing the measures, which say explicitly that they would not apply to someone who committed an offense in one state and then fled to Virginia.

“The bill is about protecting Virginia doctors for performing procedures that are perfectly legal in Virginia, and the governor seems okay with that, which is just shocking,” Simon said. “Maybe he wants to send Virginia IVF doctors to Alabama to be tried for murder.”

“The veto statement does not mischaracterize the bill’s impact,” Youngkin spokesman Christian Martinez said. The administration’s position is that if another state believes someone has violated its laws, it’s not up to Virginia to decide whether to extradite.

Among the other bills Youngkin vetoed Friday are those that would have established a state-run family and medical leave program, abolished the common-law crime of suicide and required landlords to enter into payment plans with delinquent tenants.

With his vetoes mounting this week, Youngkin did not commit when asked at an event Wednesday if he planned to amend the budget or veto it entirely. But the governor said he and the General Assembly can find compromise between the package of tax cuts and tax increases he proposed, and the tax hike approved by Democratic — and some Republican — lawmakers.

The compromise, as Youngkin described it: Leaving taxes unchanged while boosting spending on shared priorities — something he said was possible due to the “substantial amount of resources available to the commonwealth.”

“I’m very optimistic that we can come together around a compromise budget,” he said Wednesday after signing an anti-labor-trafficking bill in Colonial Heights, a city south of Richmond. “I think that we can come to an agreement that we won’t have a tax decrease nor a tax increase and still have substantial resources for all of our priorities, including record investments in education, including teacher raises, record investment in law enforcement, record investment in behavioral and health, and health-care support. We can get this done.”

In December, Youngkin proposed a tax overhaul plan that involved cutting personal income tax rates but raising the state sales tax and extending the sales tax to digital goods, such as music downloads. After two years of tax cuts and rebates, though, totaling some $5 billion, Democrats and some Republicans were leery of further cuts that would permanently reduce state revenue at a time of economic uncertainty.

So House and Senate budget negotiators scrapped the tax cuts and the idea of raising the sales tax, but did agree to extend the sales tax to digital goods. And they went a step further, applying that digital sales tax to downloads bought by businesses; Youngkin’s proposal only covered consumers.

Youngkin reacted by staging a campaign-style tour in which he told friendly Republican audiences around the state that lawmakers had passed a “backward budget” that he would have to fix. He promised that he would not sign a tax increase into law.

Behind the rhetoric, Youngkin reached out to Senate President Pro Tempore L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth), chairwoman of the Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee; Del. Luke E. Torian (D-Prince William), chairman of House Appropriations; and Scott to see if they would work with him to undo the Assembly’s plans. The Democrats refused.

“One of the last conversations we had with him was that President Lucas and I will wait for him to send back his recommendations to the General Assembly on Monday and there was not going to be any discussion on compromise or anything of that nature,” Torian said in an interview Friday. “He just has to do what he has to do and follow the process and then we’ll go from there.”

Torian said his position is that the General Assembly did its job — passed a balanced budget with bipartisan support — and should not be asked by the governor to second-guess itself. The lawmakers’ budget uses extra revenue to fund priorities such as raises for teachers and state employees, increases to chronically underfunded K-12 schools and aid to higher education aimed at tuition relief — all of which they touted in their own campaign-style tour around the state. Without the extra tax revenue, Democrats say those increases would be impossible to support.

State Sen. R. Creigh Deeds (D-Charlottesville), a member of the Senate Finance Committee, questioned Youngkin’s claim about working toward a compromise.

“Honestly, he’s not negotiating with anybody,” said Deeds, who is second in seniority on the committee, behind Lucas. “To do what he wants to do, he’s going to have to veto the budget. That’s going to take a lot of guts and I don’t know that he’s that courageous.”

Vetoing the budget could be a first in Virginia, said Deeds, who first joined the legislature in 1992 and has served under nine governors. “I’ve been in the legislature almost as long as anybody down there,” he said. “I never heard of that before. I think it’s unprecedented.”

Bob Holsworth, a veteran Richmond political analyst, said he’d be surprised if Youngkin vetoed the entire budget.

“That’s very much a nuclear option and I’m just not sure that he’s built up the political capital that that’s going to be seen positively,” he said.

The reason Youngkin might resort to a blanket veto lies in the way the budget is structured. For instance, the budget proposed by the General Assembly would put Virginia back into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), an interstate compact for trading carbon emissions credits. Youngkin took Virginia out of RGGI last year, calling its surcharge on utilities a “tax” that gets passed on to consumers. But the new budget uses revenue from rejoining RGGI to fund several environmental initiatives. That interconnectedness makes it tricky for a governor to use a line-item veto to, say, get rid of RGGI again.

State Supreme Court rulings have required that a governor strike a budget item in its entirety when vetoing it. Under previous governors, the legislature has used that limit on the governor’s veto power to its advantage. In 2014 and 2016, Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) vetoed language that Republicans had inserted in the budget to prevent him from expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act without legislative sign-off.

But Republicans insisted that he could not veto the language without striking the entire Medicaid program in 2014. Two years later, Republicans structured the anti-expansion amendment to apply to the entire state budget. McAuliffe’s office disagreed, but both times, the House Clerk’s Office, which prints the final laws, declared the veto invalid and left it out.

Scott said Friday that he is brushing up on studying state law and previous cases so he can deal with procedural rulings on the governor’s actions. “The speaker and the clerk have to work together to address those issues. I have to be prepared,” he said.

With slim Democratic majorities in both chambers, the House and Senate would probably have trouble overriding a full-budget veto. That means legislators would have to start from…