Video: VA Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell Says Youngkin’s Been “incredibly confrontational and aggressive”; “I’ve never seen a governor do a press conference regarding their budget amendments”

Yesterday afternoon, VA Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell had some pointed comments about Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s vetoes, amendments, etc. See below for video, as well as highlights, including:

• “We have not yet seen the detail of the governor’s 233 budget amendments yet, our staff hasn’t had a chance to analyze them, and his presentation has left us with a lot of questions…”
• “First of all, while the governor had a very conciliatory tone today, this press conference he had today is pretty unprecedented in the…15 years I’ve served; I’ve never seen a governor do a press conference regarding their budget amendments and I think this this press event is really a distraction from the record number of vetos this Governor has issued, which is unprecedented in the history of our Commonwealth.”
• “In terms of his presentation, I found it striking that the governor says he now opposes tax increases after he proposed one himself in his own budget. In the press conference, the governor’s staff took credit for a lot of proposals that were made in the budget by the Democrats in the House and the Senate and the General Assembly which were not in his original budget.”
• “I also want to note that the tone of the Secretary of Finance at the outset regarding the state’s fiscal outlook was markedly different than the tone he gave at the first meeting of the Senate finance committee at the beginning of session. And I would encourage all of you to go back and look at the link I tweeted back to Secretary Cummings’ presentation in January where he said there were a lot of economic red flags on the horizon and a lot of recessionary pre-indicator in the Virginia economy that ought to give us significant caution in terms of how we budget. The presentation today was very rosy and rainbows and sunshine and as if we have lots of money to spend on everything we want. And that’s inconsistent with the tone the administration was taking in December and January…and that kind of inconsistency is very troubling.”
• “From our perspective, the governor continues to engage in these sort of campaign-style events and branding of his  initiatives, which is not something we normally see out of Virginia governors. In a lot of ways, it feels like this governor has not yet left campaign mode and moved into governing mode, and he’s continued to be sort of take a very partisan tone with regard to a lot of his policy proposals.”
• “I noted that the governor said that he continues to oppose us staying in RGGI. I would note that the RGGI situation is currently still in litigation because the General Assembly and many other people believe the governor’s action withdrawing us from RGGI was illegal. Virginia law required us to join RGGI and he pulled us out by executive action which was not authorized. And that’s going to continue to be a bone of contention.”
• “The big questions with regard to the budget you just heard is we have serious questions as to whether or not this budget can be structurally balanced. The governor’s prior budget which he claimed was balanced raided…state literary fund, it raided our Revenue Reserve fund, it used one-time money from construction to fund ongoing expenses, it used a bunch of tricks to so-called balance our budget which is required by our constitution.”
• “In the presentation you just heard, you didn’t hear any explanation as to how the governor is dealing with the $2.4 billion carry-forward from the last budget or the $800 million in our Revenue Reserve fund. And from my perspective, maybe at Carlyle it’s okay to say a budget is structurally balanced when you use onetime money. But unlike Carlyle or private equity, firms the general assembly has to follow our constitution, which requires a balanced budget. And we have to work with our bond rating agencies to ensure the long-term solvency of our Commonwealth and ensure our long-term AAA bond rating which we’ve held now for almost a 100 years. And as is often the case, it’s Virginians and it’s the General Assembly who are the ones who often have to do the serious work and continue to live with the consequences of what’s often short-term fiscal recklessness that’s proposed by governors that they propose in order to make the news. And so we’re going to be looking at these proposals very carefully to make make sure that the budget is structurally balanced in accordance with our constitution, with our bond agency obligations. And we’re going to make sure that this budget, these amendments provide the level of services that Virginians expect given the level of wealth and income and expectations of our citizens…We have a lot of work to do to evaluate these 233 amendments. I don’t remember any Governor ever proposed 233 amendments and it’s obviously going to take take some time to get through all that.”
• “His budget didn’t have the same pay increase for teachers, state employees, and it also didn’t have 3%. That’s just one example, but a lot of the natural resource commitments weren’t in there…There was a whole series of things.”
• “Our obligation is to is to balance the budget in accordance with the constitution, in accordance with what our rating agencies expect to maintain our bond rating. And if we’re going to maintain the level level of spending that we had in our prior budget and maintain the budget priorities we had, the  modest tax modernization that we had in our last proposal was necessary in order to get the revenues to support that level of service.”
• “I think there could be serious constitutional questions with exactly how he proposed his amendments, because you know under our constitution, you can’t propose amendments where you decouple revenue and spending, because then you end up having a a constitutionally unbalanced budget which would be illegal.”
• “He’s clearly trying to to make up for the fact that he’s vetoed more bills than any other governor in the history of the Commonwealth and make it appear that he’s not being nearly as confrontational or partisan as he’s been for the last three weeks. But I also suspect that tonight you’re probably going to see another 20 to 50 vetoes come out of his office, but he didn’t bother to talk about that today either so we’ll see how people are feeling after the governor has issued probably over 200 vetos by the time this is said and done. You know, 200 vetoes doesn’t really set the tone for ‘hey, let’s hold hands and get get along and sing kumbaya’.”
• “He likes to say lots of things but that doesn’t always necessarily mean they’re true. And I can appreciate the fact that he wants to try to show he’s trying to work with us for the press, but the reality is I don’t know how somebody who drops 200 vetoes in an unprecedented manner and has a press conference no governor’s ever had before, could be seen as trying to be conciliatory. He’s trying to cover up for the fact that he’s been incredibly confrontational and aggressive with vetoing very modest policy proposals, many of which are supported by over 70% of Voters on in polling…including the retail sale of marijuana, raising our minimum wage to $15 an hour, and he won’t even have dialogue about it.”
• “The Constitution says that we can take up to 10 days in veto session to consider these things, so we’ll see if we end up going just one day like usual or whether we take a few days to look at it. I haven’t talked to the House leadership or or my own caucus yet about about how long it’s going to take to get through all this, but we are going to have a pretty significant amount of work compared to what we usually have to do in a veto session. So I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up having to take more than one day.”
• “Again, the big question we have is exactly how did he make this balance, without having the revenue changes we proposed. He did not explain in his presentation what he’s doing with the $2.4 billion revenue carry-forward from last year’s budget or the $800 million revenue reserve fund. And in his last budget, he claimed it was structurally balanced when he was using one-time money to pay for all kinds of things and he didn’t have any plans on how to pay for anything in year two. I mean, you don’t structurally balance a two-year budget by using one-time money in year one and then figuring it out later. Maybe that’s how you do it in business, but that’s not how we do it in Virginia. And so we need to we need to carefully look at all this to see whether this budget is consistent with Virginia’s traditions and our fiscal
  conservatism that has allowed us to keep that bond rating for almost 100 years.”