The Virginia General Assembly will reconvene April 20 to vote on vetoed bills from this year's session.
Gov. Terry McAuliffe vetoed 32 of 811 bills this past session — more than any Virginia governor since 1998. Most of these were rejected based on party affiliations, Jeff Ryer, spokesperson for the Virginia Senate Republican Caucus, said.
The chief patron of the vetoed bill must enact a vote in his or her own chamber. If two-thirds of both the House of Delegates and the Senate vote to override the gubernatorial veto, then the bill passes.
“It’s the legislator’s decision whether or not to seek a vote,” Ryer said. “If he was successful in his own chamber, it would go to the other chamber.”
Abigail Fox, communications director for Sen. Barbara Favola (D-Arlington), said an override of a veto proves the importance of the bill to General Assembly.
“It is a higher bar, which makes it a powerful tool from the governor’s perspective,” Fox said. “You have to have more agreement than you normally would to pass a bill.”
However, a veto is not the only way to keep a bill from passing.
“There’s a lot of ways of killing a bill,” Fox said. “One of the ways is to never take it up — it can be left in committee.”
After passing one chamber, many bills were delivered to committees, where they remained while the General Assembly was adjourned. Committees have the choice to vote on the bill during the next session.
“Members of a committee often don’t want to vote for or against something,” Fox said. “If they can avoid taking a recorded vote, then they’d probably want to do so.”
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