Statehouse beat: The devolution of the West Virginia Legislature

Case in point: During my first few sessions, repeal of the state’s mandatory helmet law for motorcyclists was a perennial issue. During those years, there were also perennial battles over enacting mandatory seat belt legislation.

Debate over those bills could become quite heated. I can still recall then-Delegate Nancy Guthrie, who as a nurse had seen firsthand the horrific results of riding unbelted, being reduced to tears over the defeat of mandatory seat belt legislation one session.

However, over time, both issues receded as subjects of legislative debate.

The Feds ultimately forced the state to enact a mandatory seatbelt law, using the threat of systematic and increasingly severe cuts in federal Highways funding if the state didn’t comply.

Over time, however, the idea that seat belts were an affront to personal liberty faded into obscurity, and as of last fall, the Governor’s Highway Safety Program reported a statewide seat belt usage rate of 92%, actually slightly higher than the national average.

Likewise, the issue of mandatory helmet laws was seemingly put to rest — until this week.

With the myriad critical problems and issues facing the state, the House of Delegates devoted considerable time and energy to the pressing matter of…allowing motorcyclists to stand upright while riding (House Bill 2752).

And with devolution being what it is, the House devoted an extended amount of that floor debate to an amendment to the bill to repeal the mandatory helmet law.

Delegate Bill Anderson, R-Wood, who has been in the Legislature for almost as long as I’ve been covering it, noted that he had participated in the selfsame debate back when Cecil Underwood was governor (1997-2001).

Yes, nearly 30 years of déjà vu.

At least the legislators of the 1990s were not hypocrites, unlike their present-day counterparts, since they did not talk sanctimoniously about their commitment to preserving the right of personal choice despite having rescinded women’s reproductive rights.

During this week’s debate, there was general consensus that a helmet law repeal would result in increased numbers of deaths and catastrophic injuries, and a lot of supposedly pro-life Republicans were good with that, with justifications for permitting such carnage ranging from “God’s will� to an absurd premise that many West Virginians eat too much fast food, and are likely to die prematurely anyway.

There is a compilation video of the many inane comments on the amendment that is circulating on social media, a video that would be hilarious were it not so sad.

Ultimately, the no helmet amendment was defeated by a relatively narrow 13-vote margin, with the majority perhaps swayed by the words of Delegate Bill Ridenour, R-Jefferson: “I’m not sure the freedom to die is a great freedom. Why don’t we permit suicide?�

It’s not clear if this was a reference to legislators who last year perpetrated an amendment to the state Constitution preemptively banning physician-assisted euthanasia.

So legislation legalizing the right to ride upright (although, in the name of safety, it does stipulate that one must be facing forward whilst doing so) advances to the Senate, and as Delegate Shawn Fluharty, D-Ohio, snarkily noted, the number of bills this session that do nothing substantive for the state have reached such lengths that Evel Kinevel himself would have struggled to complete a motorcycle jump over them.

Instead of becoming smarter, wiser and more compassionate over the past 36 years, the Legislature is devolving, and for that, I blame the voters, who each election cycle opt to lower the quality of the legislators that they send to ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä.

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Meanwhile, the legislative majority is consistent only in its inconsistency.

I’ve written previously about how one of the first actions Republicans took after gaining control of the House and Senate in 2015 was to enact legislation mandating that judicial elections be nonpartisan.

At the time, majority party legislators concluded that electing the best, most-qualified jurists should take precedence over party affiliation.

A decade later, Republican supermajorities have evidently concluded that voters are so ill-informed and disengaged that they might inadvertently elect a progressive judge if they are not clued in on which candidates are Republicans.

Sen. Tom Willis, R-Berkeley, lead sponsor on a bill to make judicial elections partisan again, didn’t try to disguise the intent of the SB 521, stating in a floor speech: “It’s a way to keep liberal judges from slipping through the cracks.�

Similarly, Republican legislators were so smitten with a 2015 state Supreme Court ruling stating that appointments to fill vacancies in office must be based on the individual’s party affiliation at time of resignation, not election, that they subsequently passed legislation codifying the ruling.

That was after Daniel Hall was elected to the Senate as a Democrat, then changed parties to break a 17-17 deadlock after the 2014 elections, and subsequently resigned from the Senate in 2015 to become a lobbyist.

At the time, Republican legislators concluded that the individual’s personal party preference should outweigh the will of a majority of the voters.

Fast forward a few years ahead, to the bizarre case of Joseph de Soto, elected to the House in November as a Republican, but who in an apparent fit of anger switched parties after being rebuffed by the House Republican caucus.

House leadership used some shady procedural maneuvering to vacate de Soto’s seat, and Gov. Patrick Morrisey used some equally shady logic to appoint a Republican in his place.

And now, the legislative majority has changed its collective mind and concluded that, indeed, the will of the voters should prevail, and that vacancies in office should be filled by a member of the individual’s party at time of election, not resignation (SB 586).

Don’t be surprised that if numbers of Democrats in the Legislature start inching back up at some point — which could happen sooner rather than later as the damage being inflicted on the state by Donald Trump ramps up — that the legislative majority will change its mind once again and conclude that respecting the will of the majority of voters wasn’t such a good idea after all.

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One of the last bills going into the hopper prior to last Tuesday’s deadline to introduce bills in the House was HB 3412, which would exempt the Legislature from the state Freedom of Information Act.

While that’s a scary concept, what makes matters worse is that the lead sponsor of the bill is none other than House Speaker Roger Hanshaw, R-Clay, and all eight of the bill’s co-sponsors are in House leadership. The bill has bypassed the usual committee process, going straight to the powerful Rules Committee.

That means all that is needed to bring the bill to the House floor is a single vote on a single motion. Considering that the bill’s nine co-sponsors all serve on Rules, they would need just two additional votes from the 20-member committee to advance the bill to the floor.

The obvious question is, why does the Legislature want to exempt itself from FOIA, one of the best tools citizens have to promote government transparency and accountability?

It’s not like the Legislature is being inundated with FOIA requests. So far this year, the Senate has received two requests and the House has none.

In 2024, the Senate received 19 FOIAs and the House 60 FOIAs. Granted, FOIA requests increase in election years, as various entities conduct opposition research, and while I’m sure that’s a hassle for legislative staffers, it is no justification to cut off public access to public records.

The bill does allow the Legislature to adopt its own rules in lieu of the state FOIA law, so perhaps that’s a saving grace.

Otherwise, on the face of it, one wonders why the Legislature wants to hamstring the ability of the public and the media to access public records and documents.

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Finally, it struck me that for the entirety of his political career in West Virginia, Gov. Morrissey has desperately been trying to shed his image as a carpetbagger.

Thus, he dubbed his plan to make West Virginia economically competitive with states it borders as the “Backyard Brawl,� evoking a phrase near and dear to native West Virginians.

So when West Virginia University was outrageously snubbed for an NCAA men’s basketball tournament bid despite metrics superior to teams that received bids, it was wholly predictable that Morrisey would ramp up his publicity machine and feign indignation over what he deemed a “corrupt� system. (Morrisey did not express similar outrage over his alma mater, Rutgers University, failing to obtain an NCAA bid, perhaps because his team had a losing record this season.)

It was not clear what resolution Morrissey and Attorney General JB McCuskey hoped to achieve mere hours before the start of the tournament. A court order giving WVU North Carolina’s spot in the tournament? A public apology? A share of tournament payouts?

No, it was all strictly performative, an all-too-obvious attempt by Morrisey to convince gullible voters that he is a true-blue West Virginian.