Don't ignore a clear message from Virginia's voters

You’d think the GOP won the House of Delegates by a landslide rather than a game of chance.

Before the winner's name was drawn from a mixing bowl, Republicans were full of goodwill, bipartisanship and cooperation.

Once it was called out and they held a one-vote majority, you’d think voters had given Republicans some sort of mandate in an epic landslide. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

In fact, a blue wave swept Virginia in November. Puffery from Republicans dismissing their near loss of House control as an anti-Trump reaction ignores the fact that the president is their party’s leader. Unless he is removed or somehow reverses his ever-declining approval ratings by 2019, he’ll be even a heavier millstone when they next return to voters.

So that makes it perplexing that delegates have their boxers in a bunch because a Democratic governor who thumped a pro-Trump Republican actually used his inaugural to talk about the issues that got him elected. The nerve.

Speaker Kirk Cox is warning that bipartisanship is only an option if Democrats refrain from talking about the issues important to their voters. Wait. What?

And Democrats demonstrated how full-contact politics are played when they decided not to vote for a Republican’s bill for an emergency reinstatement of a failing hospital’s license to operate when the same legislator wasn’t supportive of expanded health care for people outside his own district. Welcome to the real world. Let the mutual back-scratching begin.

We hope they’ll be more real-world moments for the House GOP, which apparently still needs to learn a lesson about how a two-party system works. Thanks to gerrymandering, they haven’t had much practice at it, so we can forgive them for having to learn to balance on that bike again. We’ll probably see a few more skinned knees before it’s all over, but that’s OK, if they learn to ride – and walk - upright.

And we’ll have to wait and see if the wave becomes a tsunami by the next time around. If so, the flip might be more than a coin and instead involve total control of state government. And if treated poorly for the next two years, Democrats might have long memories about how out-of-power parties are to be treated, even if the margin is narrow and voters clearly want the sides working together for the common good.

Our View represents the opinion of our Editorial Board: Roger Watson, president; David Fritz, executive editor; William Ramsey, news director.