Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) could see his influence grow on the state Board of Education and four other state panels as a result of a dispute with Democrats over his nomination of a former Trump Cabinet member to oversee environmental policy.
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House Republicans last week voted against confirming 11 of former governor Ralph Northam’s (D) appointments after Senate Democrats rejected Andrew Wheeler — a former coal lobbyist who served as Environmental Protection Agency administrator under President Donald Trump — as Youngkin’s pick for state secretary of natural and historic resources.
The move to block the 11 nominations — which Republicans said was in response to Wheeler not being confirmed — broke a long-standing tradition in Virginia’s General Assembly to confirm a previous governor’s state board nominations without fanfare, regardless of political party.
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Garren Shipley, spokesman for House Speaker Todd Gilbert (R-Shenandoah), said in a statement that the 11 rejected state board members were selected “to give Gov. Youngkin the greatest possible impact on his policy priorities.”
Political analysts say the tit-for-tat maneuver is part of the increasingly partisan environment enveloping Richmond since Youngkin took office.
It nonetheless allows the new governor to advance his agenda another way, through appointments to the vacant seats on the Board of Education, the Air Pollution Control Board, the Water Control Board, the Virginia Marine Resources Commission and the Safety and Health Codes Board.
“If I had to guess, the governor already had this in mind but, now, he has the cover to do it,” said Mark J. Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, referring to the 11 rejections and the claim by Republicans that Democrats prompted the move by taking the rare step of rejecting a governor’s Cabinet pick.
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Several of the 11 board members caught up in the scuffle expressed surprise over seeing their names included on a list of denied confirmations that had been whittled down from what Republicans initially threatened would be 1,000 rejections.
The governor’s office did not respond to messages for comment. Previously, his spokespeople had said that Youngkin would quickly work to fill the empty seats. Nominees must be confirmed by both the GOP-controlled House of Delegates and the Senate, where Democrats hold the majority.
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The greatest impact is likely to be seen on the nine-seat Board of Education, which will soon have a majority of Youngkin appointees. Before last week, the entire board was made up of appointees of either Northam or Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D).
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Three members — Jamelle S. Wilson, Anthony Swann and Steward D. Roberson — had their terms suddenly expire years earlier than they expected when their appointments were not confirmed. Anne B. Holton, the state’s former secretary of education and wife of U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), was reconfirmed. The four-year terms for another three members are set to naturally expire in June.
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Youngkin has made education his chief priority, setting out on his first day in office to do away with mask mandates inside schools, a goal he reached this week when the General Assembly passed a law enabling parents to opt their children out.
Youngkin also has moved to bar teachers from exposing students to “inherently divisive concepts” such as critical race theory, the academic exercise to examine systemic racism that is not part of Virginia’s K-12 curriculum but has become conservative shorthand for any attempt to teach cultural awareness.
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The Board of Education has in recent years supported policies championed by Democrats.
Wilson, who served as the board’s vice president after joining in 2017, said she is proud of the strides she and her colleagues made to facilitate the expansion of prekindergarten classes in public schools and to incorporate cultural competency as a metric in how teachers are evaluated.
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“As a board, we have worked very hard and consistently to keep student learning and student achievement at the forefront of our efforts,” said Wilson, a former Hanover County Public Schools superintendent who is now dean of the University of Richmond School of Professional and Continuing Studies. She added that the board was set to focus more on literacy during the next four years.
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“I’m proud to have been part of that and I’m confident, hopeful, that will continue to be the focus,” Wilson said.
Swann, a Franklin County fifth-grade teacher who was named the state’s teacher of the year shortly after he was appointed in June 2020, declined to comment. Roberson, another former Hanover County superintendent who now heads an architectural and engineering firm with offices across the Mid-Atlantic region, did not respond to messages seeking comment.
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Democrats angry about the Republican maneuver highlighted the credentials of those and other board members, saying the move sets a dangerous precedent.
“I hope that this is an anomaly and from this point forward, I hope that both House leadership and the executive branch will live up to its promise of wanting to work together collaboratively for the good of the commonwealth,” Sen. Mamie Locke (D-Hampton) said on the Senate floor Wednesday.
She noted that McAuliffe reappointed 40 of Republican Gov. Robert F. McDonnell’s state board nominees after his administration neglected to submit their names on time for approval. McAuliffe could have used the opportunity to fill those slots with his own picks, but instead reappointed them, Locke said.
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Sen. Adam P. Ebbin (D-Alexandria), who chairs the privileges and elections committee, which oversees nomination confirmations, said in an interview that the hardball tactic employed by Republicans “is not how we roll down here.”
Virginia General Assembly hits midpoint with House and Senate on markedly different paths
He urged Youngkin to reappoint the 11 board members himself, arguing that it could help prevent a “new tradition” from taking hold in the General Assembly that allows state board members to be arbitrarily removed.
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“And the House started that tradition, and I hope that the Senate doesn’t have to continue it,” Ebbin said, adding that he wasn’t threatening that will be the case. “But it would just be great not to have that as a precedent.”
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The near-term effect of the purge was on display during an emergency meeting Wednesday that the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry’s Safety and Health Codes Board held at the behest of Youngkin.
The chief item on the agenda was to reconsider a mandate implemented under Northam for employers to follow Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention guidelines for preventing the spread of the coronavirus, including requiring workers to wear masks and socially distance.
With the recent surge in coronavirus cases brought on by the omicron variant having dropped in Virginia to where they were just before Christmas, the Youngkin administration argued that there is no longer a compelling reason to continue the mandate, which applied to about 3.7 million workers covered under state occupational health and safety regulations.
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Union leaders accused Republicans of working to ensure that the requirements are lifted in Virginia by yanking two board members likely to support keeping them: Milagro Rodriguez, the board chair and a designated employee representative, and Fernando Franco, a wine grower in Barboursville who was recently appointed by Northam to also represent employees.
“It’s clear that there is a big push for silencing the voices of workers and putting them in harm’s way, and we won’t stand for it,” Doris Crouse-Mays, president of the Virginia AFL-CIO, said in a statement.
Rodriguez, an occupational health and safety specialist with the American Federation of Government Employees who has been on the board since 2004, said she was informed Monday that she no longer needed to attend the Wednesday meeting.
During the early days of the pandemic, Virginia was the first state to implement coronavirus standards to protect workers from infection, which prompted other states to follow suit, she said.
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“We had some very strong protections,” she said. “That was a time when the board really did a lot of good work, with the staff. That certainly has been the highlight of my work with the board.”
At the Wednesday meeting, the board voted 7 to 3 to end the mandate, with “yes” votes coming from Tina Hoover, a former board member working in human resources brought back by Youngkin for the meeting, and three other board members whose nominations the House confirmed last week.
Laura Vozzella contributed to this report.