Statehouse beat: Legislature lurches more toward extreme right

While House Republicans renominated moderate House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, R-Clay, Hanshaw’s leadership appointments for the 87th Legislature seem to be acts of political expediency, recognizing that with the 2024 elections, that house has also moved hard right.

That’s typified by the appointment of Delegate Patrick McGeehan, R-Hancock, as majority leader.

McGeehan is a bright guy, no doubt, but his politics are extreme. He’s perhaps the most vocal member of the far-right Liberty Caucus.

He most recently made the news (thanks to Mike Tony’s excellent-as-usual reporting) for his pivotal role in steering $5 million of taxpayer dollars intended to fund water and sewer infrastructure projects to a nascent Catholic college in Steubenville, Ohio, that supports a “conservative political vision� for West Virginia, including the state’s near-total abortion ban and Texas’ policy to jail migrants at the southern border.

The grant might have been less malodorous had proper procedures and law been followed in its awarding, but with this being Jim Justice’s last hurrah as governor, it was no time for the Justice administration to start following the rule of law.

The grant also might have been more palatable if every water and sewer system in the state had already been modernized and updated, but one need go no further than across the Ohio River into Weirton to find residents enduring frequent boil water and conservation orders because the city’s antiquated water system is subject to frequent line breaks.

McGeehan also championed a referendum that resulted in the narrow passage of a constitutional amendment making doctor-assisted euthanasia unconstitutional (Never mind that it’s already illegal in West Virginia) as part of a pro-life narrative. (As I noted, with passage of the amendment, Republicans now recognize the sanctity of life from conception to birth, and again from the diagnosis of terminal illness to death.)

Combine that with Hanshaw’s appointment of Delegate Brandon Steele, R-Raleigh, as Judiciary Chairman (an appointment that at press time was looking increasingly iffy), seems to reflect Hanshaw’s acknowledgement that the 2024 election moved the House farther to the right.

Steele has advocated for a total ban on abortions with no exceptions, and has led the charge for dismantling any gun safety laws that managed to survive the past decade. (Ironic, in light of recent events.) Last year, he sponsored legislation that would have made it possible to put teachers and librarians in prison for having books that certain individuals might find offensive.

The appointment of McGeehan to the leadership team could be strategic maneuver on Hanshaw’s part. He certainly would not be the first speaker or president to appoint someone to leadership in order to assure that individual would not become an adversary. (Sort of a “keep your friends close — and your enemies closer� strategy.)

However, these appointments feel less like a strategic maneuver and more an act of appeasement to the growing number of MAGA Republicans in the House.

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Speaking of the House, way back on Dec. 14, writing about House plans to refuse to seat newly elected Delegate Joseph de Soto after he allegedly threatened certain members of the GOP caucus, I said of the complication of de Soto’s last-minute change of party affiliation from Republican to Democrat — which under a 2018 law passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature would require that a Democrat fill the vacancy — “...don’t be surprised if the majority party bends over backwards to break its own precedent to find a way to assure that de Soto’s seat in the House is not filled by a Democrat.�

Sure enough, instead of expelling de Soto from the House, the House on Wednesday passed a resolution declaring that his seat was vacated since he had failed to take the oath of office that day (he’s under home confinement after being arrested for the alleged threats), and claiming that, since the seat was vacated, and since the last person to represent the district was Republican, the vacancy must be filled by a Republican. (Never mind that seven other delegates were also absent Wednesday, including Steele, and thus also failed to take the oath of office.)

Undoubtedly, this one will end up in the courts.

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In a recent op-ed published in this and other newspapers around the state, outgoing Senate President Craig Blair, R-Berkeley, offered a look back on his 20 years of legislative service, and hailed some “significant milestones� that he led readers to believe had all occurred during his tenure in the Legislature, including reforming the state Workers’ Compensation system, stabilizing state pension funds, eliminating the sales tax on food and building a state Rainy Day revenue shortfall reserve fund.

For readers who don’t closely follow current events, and whose knowledge of history is lacking (which, based on the results of the 2024 election, describes the majority of voters), the op-ed leaves the impression that the cited accomplishments occurred, if not during Blair’s Senate leadership, at least during the past decade of Republican control of the Legislature.

In actuality, many of the milestones Blair cited occurred before he was a member of the Legislature, and long before Republicans took control of the House and Senate.

The heavy lifting to stabilize state pension funds took place in the 1990s, with passage in 1994 of a 40-year plan to pay down unfunded liabilities in the Teachers Retirement System via millions in annual payments, and significantly, with passage in 1997 of a Constitutional amendment to allow state investments in stocks, which led to the creation of the Investment Management Board to manage state pension portfolios.

Another key building block to that stabilization came in 2007, when the Legislature used $807 million of Democratic Attorney General Darrell V. McGraw’s $1 billion-plus tobacco settlement to shore up the pension funds.

The Rainy Day fund, intended to provide a source of state funding to rapidly respond to disasters and emergencies, was also created in 1994.

Granted, Blair was in the House in 2005 when legislation to privatize Workers’ Comp and pay down what came to be known as the Old Fund debt was enacted, although as a back-bencher and a member of the minority party, he contributed little to its enactment. That year also saw passage of legislation to phase out the sales tax on food.

For whatever reason, Blair conveniently failed to acknowledge that many of the milestones he cited in his op-ed occurred before he was a legislator, and most certainly occurred when Democrats controlled the House, Senate and executive branch. Details, details.

Of course, he might be taking a cue from Justice, who has happily participated in many a groundbreaking while failing to acknowledge that myriad projects like Nucor and Form Energy are directly tied to President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Act and Inflation Reduction Act.

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Finally, I’ve been reading with interest recent articles about how cable news networks CNN and MSNBC have seen their viewership drop precipitously post-election.

(Ratings for Fox News, which the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit revealed to be an entertainment channel as opposed to a legitimate news-gathering organization, apparently have not been affected.)

I can offer some anecdotal evidence as to why that’s happening.

In the past, MSNBC functioned as the de facto default channel on my television. Post-election, however, I’ve found myself taking solace in binging sit-coms from the 1960s and ‘70s.

These days, my MSNBC viewing is generally limited to the final hour of Morning Joe and Joy Reid in the evening. However, those programs mostly function as background noise, as I’m usually reading the newspaper in the morning, and I set aside the 7 o’clock hour to devote to whatever book I’m reading at the moment.

I visited my brother and favorite niece over the holidays, and found he’s had an even more dramatic reaction to the election in that he has stopped watching television news entirely. (He still watches CBS Sunday Morning, but records it so he can fast-forward through any segments that are even remotely related to current headlines.)

I suspect similar behavior on the part of those viewers tuning out CNN and MSNBC. After all, if half the country is content to be blissfully ignorant, why not the rest of us?

(The fact that Google searches for “Did Joe Biden drop out?� spiked on Election Day is proof positive of that blissful ignorance.)

Worse yet, we have to acknowledge that a certain portion of the electorate were not ill-informed, or focused entirely on the price of eggs, but knew exactly who and what Donald Trump is, and chose to vote for him anyway.

If Timothy Leary’s message to an earlier generation was to “turn on, tune in, and drop out,� the current mindset of many Americans post-election seems to be to turn off and tune out the news.

While that reaction is understandable under the circumstances, one hopes it is only temporary.

The coming year will be calamitous, both at the state and national level, and the worst possible outcome would be for Americans and West Virginians to turn off and tune out and remain silent in the face of potential tyrannical behavior on the part of our elected officials.