Are Gilmore’s bloggers actually reading these bills?

The next line of criticism from the Gilmore people (note that I did not say “attack” – looking over someone’s record is not an attack, whether we do it or they) regards another bill from the way-back machine, in this case a bill Marshall supported in 2000 that Spank That Donkey claims would create just the type of regional authority that Marshall fought in the legislature and the courts in HB3202.

First of all, I must commend STD on the title – nicely done!  Unfortunately for him, it goes downhill from there.  Here’s the part that STD thinks is so damning about the economic development authorities the bill would have created:

(the authority could) receive from participating localities contributions of taxes levied within the district; distribute its revenues according to an agreement among participating localities; and, with the concurrence of the member localities, levy an incremental real property tax for capital investment and special services within the district

Now, at first, again, it sounds a lot like HB3202.  Only when one actually reads closely what the bill says that the argument falls apart.  In each and every case, the authority in question can do nothing without the approval of the member local governments.  They cannot receive any money that the localities do not wish to give; they cannot distribute any money unless the localities agree to the exact formula, and they cannot impose any taxes unless the local governments give them the OK.

HB3202, by contrast, gave the transportation authorities the ability to do anything they wanted irrespective of the local governments’ wishes – the accountability that HB1474 preserved, HB3202 discarded.  That is a fundamental difference.

Another major difference is that HB3202 mandated certain tax increases from the get-go, something HB1474 does not do at all.

I would humbly submit that HB1474 is nothing like HB3202 (that’s not to say it’s a good bill – Marshall himself changed his mind after Gilmore’s veto).  Still, if only for the sake of argument, let’s say it was.  In Marshall, we would (at worst) have a candidate who would have made a mistake in 2000, corrected it, and learned from it, and still put up heroic resistance to HB 3202, whereas Gilmore cast a veto in 2000, and then paid no attention to the issue at all when it reared its ugly head again last year.

I don’t see how this makes Gilmore look better.

The fact is, Jim Gilmore was absent from the HB3202 fight.  Like most Republicans, he saw the divisions within the party and chose to punt – as, frankly, most of his bloggers did (Jim Bowden and STD himself being the most notable exceptions).  Marshall, by contrast, took the fight as far as he could possibly take, and won.  That contrast cannot be erased by reaching back eight years and misreading a bill from that time.

Cross-posted to the right-wing liberal