How Governor McAuliffe Almost Got Away With It

The stalemate in the Senate frustrated House Republicans, who had the votes to install Alston and oust Roush.

Over the following week the General Assembly would be thrown into an uproar as Ken Cuccinelli’s name was thrown into the stalemate, sending Democrats, as well as Republicans, into unmitigated hysterics. However, as quickly as Ken Cuccinelli became a part of the tug of war between the General Assembly and Governor McAuliffe, his name was extirpated, as the former Attorney General removed his name from consideration.

With this session winding down, Republican leaders turned instead to Appeals Court Judge Stephen R. McCullough, who spent more than a decade in the Attorney General’s Office, including several years under Cuccinelli, to fill the seat.

Republican leaders in both chambers said they have the votes to elevate McCullough to the state’s highest court Thursday, and Speaker of the House Williams Howell personally introduced the judge before his formal committee interview Wednesday afternoon, calling him a friend with a strong legal mind. – Daily Press

With Speaker Howell, The House of Delegates, and former Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli all behind McCullough, Republicans in the Senate came together to elect McCullough to the Supreme Court.

Clearly there was a great deal of dysfunction within Republican Ranks, but whether or not this dissent was the product of the desire for cooperation and bi-partisanship, as Senator Sturtevant would have us believe, or whether the handful of Republicans in the Senate honestly believed that Roush was the right choice, the fact remains that had Roush been seated on the Supreme Court, McAuliffe’s felon ploy would have gone unimpeded.

It would be marvelous if we could treat out courts as the nonpartisan branch of government. I have no doubt that Jane Marum Roush was qualified to sit on the Supreme Court; and while her judicial record may not have reeked of obscene partisanship, it is specifically cases such as these where politics inevitably comes into play. The entire case before the court was political in nature. The Governor attempted to restore voting rights to 200,000 convicted felons, not out of the goodness of his heart, but rather in an attempt to secure Hillary Clinton a victory in Virginia in November. Were the Court to have been controlled by Democrats, it could only have helped their future careers to play a central role in the election of a Democrat President – a President who would be nominating 1 to 4 jurists to the United States Supreme Court.

It is ridiculous and not in the spirit of our Republic that our courts should have become so political; and yet it seems as though the political nature of the courts is inevitable. We would be naïve to think otherwise. Therefore, it is incumbent we remember just how close we came to turning over the highest court in the Commonwealth over to a Governor who would shamelessly attempt such a corrupt political maneuver. In the future, I pray we do not almost make the same mistake again.