You don’t have to look back too many years to find leaders who, by all rights, should make modern day Virginia Republicans cringe at how their party has changed.
In my lifetime three Virginia Republicans especially exemplified qualities that today are out of political fashion: putting public good before party interests, fighting for social justice, and taking responsibility for their actions.
Republicans may wonder why they have not won statewide office since 2009, and why Democrats last year nearly swept away the GOP’s previous iron grip on the General Assembly. Maybe they should consider returning to the values demonstrated by M. Caldwell Butler, Linwood Holton and John Warner.
Butler died four years ago, Linwood Holton (95) and John Warner (91) are still around.
The Watergate scandal thrust freshman congressman Butler into the national spotlight in July 1974, as he had to choose whether to vote in the national interest to impeach President Richard Nixon or to support the president whose coattails lifted Butler into office two years earlier.
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Many regarded Butler’s Judiciary Committee vote to impeach Nixon as a death knell for the president. Voters in his Shenandoah Valley district appreciated Butler’s integrity and reelected him to Congress four more terms.
In today’s tribal, hyper-partisan atmosphere, fellow Republicans would drive Butler out of office.
The man who holds Butler’s old congressional seat until his retirement in January, Republican Bob Goodlatte, chairs the House Judiciary Committee. Rather than investigate whether Russia interfered with American elections in 2016 — as U.S. intelligence agencies believe — Goodlatte has his committee investigating whether the Justice Department went too easy on Hillary Clinton in its email server probe.
What brings Warner to mind is the still unfolding scandal involving fraudulent candidacy petitions in Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District in the Tidewater area.
Freshman Republican congressman Scott Taylor admits he knew his campaign staffers circulated petitions this summer to get an independent candidate on the ballot. It was an obvious attempt to split the opposition vote. Taylor dismissed complaints as “a nothing burger.”
But it turns out the petitions included forged signatures and a state judge called the case “out-and-out fraud.” A special prosecutor now oversees an investigation.
Taylor fired the campaign workers involved. His campaign says it will have no further comment.
Sen. John Warner’s approach to campaign malpractice was different, to say the least.
In 1996, when he learned his campaign staff had doctored a photograph in one of his TV ads, Warner convened news conferences in Virginia Beach and Richmond, took responsibility for his campaign, fired the offending staffers, and made a public apology to his opponent and to Virginia voters.
Sure, it was the expedient thing to do. It was also the right thing to do, and Virginians appreciated it. Voters elected John Warner to the U.S. Senate five times.
Holton should be top of mind these days because his political career was the polar opposite of this year’s Virginia Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, Corey Stewart.
A native of Southwest Virginia, Holton practiced law in Roanoke and was a leader of the moderate Mountain-Valley Republicans who fought to wrest control from the Democrats’ Byrd Machine, the decades-long political establishment that restricted minority voting and fought school integration.
Elected governor in 1969 (Virginia’s first Republican chief executive since Reconstruction), Holton took a then-revolutionary stand to promote racial tolerance, banning discrimination in state government and appointing minority candidates to leadership positions.
When Holton enrolled his children in Richmond’s mostly black public schools, it was national news. The symbolic power of Holton’s actions ushered in the modern political age in Virginia.
How did the party that produced Linwood Holton come to nominate Corey Stewart, a Minnesota native who embraces “southern heritage” and defense of Confederate Civil War monuments? The same Stewart associated with leaders of the far right who organized the violent clashes in Charlottesville in 2017. The same Stewart built his political following by drumming up public fears about undocumented immigrants.
The short answer: it’s not the same party that nominated Linwood Holton, or John Warner, or Caldwell Butler.
In the current era, many white Americans seeing their cultural and political dominance fade in an increasingly diverse nation, rallied and seized the GOP, producing President Donald J. Trump and ensured that congressional Republicans will support him.
The present day GOP is increasingly concentrated in rural districts. Partisan control over the design of election districts protects incumbents and exacerbates party tribalism.
In low-turnout elections such as the upcoming congressional mid-terms, Republicans may yet prevail for a while longer because they are disciplined about voting.
But Virginia and the country are changing. If they hope to be relevant in the long term, Republicans would be wise to look to the likes of Caldwell Butler, John Warner and Linwood Holton.