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Virginia Politics and the Trial of Governor Robert McDonnell
On Monday, August 14, 2014, beginning at 9:30 a.m., my wife Christine and I were seated in the Federal District Courtroom in Richmond, Virginia, preparing to listen to the testimony in the trial of Virginia’s former Republican Governor, Robert McDonnell and his wife Maureen. They were both charged with fraud, corruption and not reporting significant financial gifts made to both of them, totaling in the neighborhood of $177,000.
It was a sad, final chapter to what had once been a bright political future. Robert McDonnell had served for almost 14 years as a Republican member of the Virginia State legislature, where he gained for himself a reputation as a “political comer.“ In 2004 he had parlayed that competent legislative career into a successful run for the State Attorney General’s office. It was a hotly contested race against State Senator, Creigh Deeds, which McDonnell won by less than 400 votes. In 2009, in what is a traditional Virginia political trajectory, Attorney General McDonnell ran for governor, interestingly enough against the same Creigh Deeds,, but this time he won by a more impressive margin, carrying with him the Republican ticket, which included Ken Cuccinelli, to be his successor as Attorney General. Both of these candidates were identified with the “Tea Party” elements in the Republican party and both had close connections with what is called “The Religious Right.” They were both graduates of Regent University’s Law School, which was founded as a “Christian University” by television evangelist, Pat Robertson, who still serves today as its chancellor and CEO. Robertson knows his way around in Virginia politics, since he is the son of the late Senator A. Willis Robertson, who represented Virginia in the United States Senate from1946 to 1966, and is himself a graduate of the Law School of Yale University. McDonnell had actually been an instructor on the faculty of Regent University Law School.
During his four-year term as governor (Virginia governors are limited to a single four-year term by the State Constitution), McDonnell had identified himself with “Tea Party issues” He was anti-abortion, moving in ways that were designed to make the availability of abortion difficult in Virginia. He even supported a law requiring a mandatory invasive uterine procedure before an abortion could be performed, though late developing political pressure forced him to drop the word “mandatory.” When a group of about a dozen women, some of whom were mothers with young children carrying their dolls, came to the state capitol to protest, McDonnell had them greeted with state troopers in battle gear. Virginia had had a long history of suppressing minority votes, which McDonnell continued. He also never saw a gun control bill that he liked. So in his governorship, he became one on whom “The Tea Party loyalists” began to place their hopes.
In the fist month of his governorship in 2010, McDonnell was chosen to give the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address, an assignment that gave him instant national name identification. He served as the Chairman of the Republican Governors Association, a position that is frequently a stepping stone into presidential politics. He was widely mentioned on the “short list” of possible vice-presidential candidates on the Mitt Romney ticket in 2012. The future looked very bright for this budding politician, but that was not to be. His time in the governor’s office began to fall apart. The downfall began, as they so often do, in an innocuous event. The governor and his wife learned that the chief chef in the governor’s mansion had been stealing food from the mansion’s kitchen and, as the investigation proceeded, the chef
was put on “paid administrative leave.”
The chef, however, was not willing to be charged quietly. He began to leak to the press such juicy tidbits of political gossip as that the governor and his wife charged the dog food for their pets to the taxpayers of Virginia. Then he leaked the fact that a supporter had paid for all of the expenses of the wedding of the governor’s daughter that took place in the governor’s mansion. The tab was in excess of $15,000. Neither of these items had been disclosed by the governor as gifts.
The scent of scandal and political corruption grew as the press eagerly followed every lead and the papers were filled with other gifts which the McDonnell family had felt free to accept and which were never reported. Golf bags, golf clubs, golf balls and golf sweaters were given and golf fees were paid by an executive in a diet supplement business. Then it was discovered that this executive was the same person who had paid for the wedding of the governor’s daughter. The use of vacation homes, a Rolex watch, an elegant wardrobe for his wife and even the personal use of his benefactor’s Ferrari all came to public notice. There was a real question of whether the governor would be indicted before the end of his term, which would have scrambled Virginia politics, since that would have placed the Republican Lieutenant Governor, Bill Bolling, a very popular and highly-respected politician, into the governor’s office. This man had wanted to run for governor, but he was pushed aside by Ken Cuccinelli, who having succeeded McDonnell in 2009 as Attorney General, now hoped to succeed him as governor in 2013. Cuccinelli was, if anything a more hard right wing Tea Party candidate than McDonnell, and as a fellow graduate of the Law School at Regent University was also closely allied with the “religious right.” He, too, was anti-abortion, anti-government support for birth control and viscerally anti-homosexual. I am quite certain that the negative publicity generated by the retiring Republican governor did not help Cuccinelli’s campaign. He lost by a very narrow margin to Democrat Terry McAuliffe, who had received his political start as a fund raiser for both Bill and Hillary Clinton.
So the drama played out and there we sat in the Federal Court room under the great seal of the Commonwealth of Virginia, in a court presided over by James R. Spencer, who had been appointed to the Federal bench at the age of 39 on September 9, 1986, by Republican President Ronald Reagan. He was a graduate student of the Harvard School of Law and an African-American. It is fascinating to watch how the political threads weave their way into rather dramatic patterns.
Sitting before Judge Spencer on that day was a battery of lawyers, the prosecutors appointed by the Federal Government that brought the case to court; the defense attorneys, who are in private practice and who were chosen by the defendants. Both sets of lawyers included one female. The governor’s wife had her own lawyer, who was quite distinct from the governor’s legal team.
We were there on the day after the prosecution had “rested its case” and the defense was just beginning to lay its case out. The defense had previously announced that its plan would be to show that the marriage between the governor and the first lady of Virginia was so badly broken that they could never have conspired to commit fraud and that the gifts were actually given to Maureen McDonnell and not to the governor. Since the governor’s wife was not a state official, the restrictions on receiving and reporting gifts did not apply to her. Therefore, there was no crime and thus no basis for conviction. It was a peculiar argument and opened the trial to the behavior one expects only in a domestic relations court. Listening to the testimony felt like swimming in a sewer. The plan of the defense was clearly to throw the governor’s wife under the bus.
This tawdry behavior was something new in Virginia politics. This state has in its history been genteel, even while being deeply “Southern” and ultra-Conservative. Led by Senator Harry F, Byrd, who was governor from 1925-1929 and the United States Senator from 1933 until he resigned for reasons of health in 1965, Virginia politics were quite literally controlled by this powerful man and his loyalists. Senator Byrd would actually sit on the porch of his house in Berryville, Virginia, with a few close associates, and name the next governor, the next senator and the next representative to serve in the various congressional districts of that state. It was in their interests to keep the electorate as small as possible. Limiting access to the polls was aided by poll taxes and other acts of intimidation. Following the historic 9-0 desegregation decision in 1954 the Byrd machine orchestrated massive resistance, choosing to close public schools in some counties rather than to desegregate them. White ignorance was apparently preferable to desegregated learning! Virginia was part of the solid Democratic South in those days. That kind of party control began to break down only in 1966, by which time Senator Byrd had left the Senate and had been replaced by his son and namesake, Harry F. Byrd, Jr., whom one pundit said “had everything his father had except intelligence, personality and charm.” In the Democratic primary of 1966 two “moderate Democrats,” Attorney Armistead Boothe of Northern Virginia ran against the newly appointed incumbent, Harry Byrd, Jr., who was always referred to as “Little Harry,“ and State Senator William B. Spong, Jr. from Portsmouth ran against Pat Robertson’s father, the 78 year, old 22 year incumbent senator, A. Willis Robertson. Boothe lost to “Little Harry,” by a very narrow couple of thousand vote margin, but Spong defeated Robertson by 611 votes out of 880,000 votes cast. We called him “landslide Spong!”. It was the first break in Byrd machine politics. By 1972, however, Spong was defeated when George McGovern won the Democratic presidential nomination and the old conservative Democrats of the South all shifted to being Republican thus turning the South into being the solidly Republican South.
Even at the height of Senator Byrd’s dynasty, however, the “Byrds” were aristocratic, honest, hardworking and trustworthy – at least to fellow white Virginians. There was plenty to criticize in their attitudes toward race, women’s rights and gay rights, but they never descended to personal vendettas or to shouting matches between a sitting governor and the first lady. They were never touched by public scandal and corruption. The McDonnells have brought a new low to Virginia politics.
The trial is likely to play out for at least a few more weeks. What the verdict of the jury will be is obviously not yet known. Whether one or both of the McDonnells will go to jail is still uncertain. What is not uncertain, however, is that a gubernatorial administration that cultivated a strong religious identification, now looks sordid and the gentility of Virginia has been bathed in squalor. That can never be a good outcome.
John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Amy Villwock, via the Internet, writes:
Question:
An eight-year-old girl in my congregation has a father who has cancer and will likely die soon. She told a family member that she knew her father would not die because she was praying “really hard” to God. How would you respond to this child?
Answer:
Dear Amy,
There is a considerable distinction between reality and desire. This child is expressing her desire in very typical eight-year-old forms. At the age of eight, one believes that one’s parents can do anything and God is presented as a kind of parent figure with supernatural power. If one pleases God like a child pleases the child’s parents, there is an assumed payoff, i.e. the child gets the desire of his or her heart. Of course, life doesn’t work that way, but superstition and religion both feed that mentality. Christian liturgies are filled with unimaginative clichés: “Have mercy, O God”; “reward us not according to our deserving, but according to your gracious will.” In liturgy we act as if there is nothing working in our lives to commend us to God and so we are taught to throw ourselves on God’s mercy. This eight-year-old child is simply reflecting this permeating theology of Christianity. Perhaps it made sense when our primary picture of God was that of a super father or super parent, who lives above the sky, keeping record books on our behavior up to date while rewarding the faithful and punishing the wicked. If the church reflects this Santa Claus view of God, it should surprise no one that one of our children reflects it. I suspect this child has said this before and has been praised for her faith and faithfulness. What can we do or say to keep this child from having a rough time when reality moves into her fantasy world. She will survive. Most of us deal with reality when we are forced by reality to do so.
In the long term, we must start by educating the adults who pass on this theology to this eight year old child. The first lesson that adults need to learn is that Christianity does not make one secure. It does not create peace of mind amid the chaos of life. Christianity rather gives us the courage to embrace the radical insecurity of life. It gives us the courage to live creatively when there is no peace of mind, to continue putting one foot in front of the other when chaos is the reality of our lives. No one escapes the difficult times of life – not the righteous, the sacred or those who are convinced they possess the true faith.
Love this child. Set up a relationship with her that is so supportive and so honest that she may be able to give expression to her fears, which are well repressed in one who believes that her prayers can control the will of God.
I wish you well. Life is tough, there are no easy answers. That is why Paul Tillich referred to the Christian life as having “the courage to be.”
John Shelby Spong
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