The House of the General Assembly—the oldest legislative body in the western hemisphere—basically operates like a middle school classroom, with the speaker of the House playing the role of jaded, brusque teacher and the other 99 members acting like petulant, unruly students.
 |
| More feature articles:
Bell’s bills 2008 Rob Bell’s reading list |
They all dress alike with jackets and ties, sit at desks that face the teacher. There are two cliques, Republicans and Democrats, and students sit with their friends on opposite sides of the room. Roll is taken, and they stand for a prayer. Once session begins, they walk around the room and talk to classmates while others have the floor, and sometimes the teacher has to yell at them to be quiet. When they speak up in class, they talk to the teacher, not to each other, and the teacher has to moderate everything that happens so that it doesn’t get out of hand. When real class discussion gets underway and someone says something controversial, the students whistle and say, “Ooooooh.” When someone uses a big word, they repeat it and make fun of the egghead. Classwork is often dull and tedious, and some students waste class time with jokes. They boo when others talk too long. Yet somehow this body politic manages every year to make the laws that govern the 7.7 million people who live in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
I’ve come down to Richmond for three days to watch Albemarle Delegate Rob Bell in action, and any preconceived notions go out the window. House sessions last two to three hours, and usually the first hour, it seems, is spent recognizing visitors in the gallery or making commendations or introducing pictures of cows born with Virginia Tech logos on their foreheads. Then votes on a dozen bills are taken, usually with no discussion, and usually the votes are unanimous. In three days, I see only a handful of bills expire on the floor, and only slightly more often debate on a bill.
“Debate” happens this way: House Bill 1241 is up, and the speaker calls on the patron, Del. Brian Moran (D-Alexandria), to explain the bill. Moran explains that it alters the law about what constitutes credit card theft.
Up stands another delegate. “Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield for a question?”
Speaker: “Will the gentleman yield?”
Moran: “I yield.”
Speaker: “The gentleman yields.”
The other delegate: “Mr. Speaker, I ask the gentleman, would the bill make it easier for the gentleman to pay off credit cards for wagers made for the Patriots over the Giants?” Big laughs and whistles from the House—Moran, who has a New England accent, is apparently a Patriots fan.
Moran: “Mr. Speaker, that is a very sore subject.”
Later, a delegate asks another to define “skedaddle.” A bill that regulates horse racing comes up: The House votes “ayes” and “neighs.”
This does not seem like the natural environment for Rob Bell. A Navy brat who moved around the country growing up, Bell is not a laid back Southern statesman who uses country aphorisms and mint juleps to get the job done. Bell is a straight-laced, quick-talking, quick-walking, serious-business kind of guy. He is an Eagle Scout who wears a Boy Scouts of America pin on his lapel. He was such a compelling law school candidate that he applied after the deadline to UVA, got in anyway, and quickly made Law Review. He handled 2,400 cases in five years as an assistant prosecutor in Orange County. He is a mainstream conservative and, by all accounts, one of the smartest, most meticulous members of the General Assembly. He gets the job done by working long hours, grinding away into the night while others are working the cocktail circuit in Richmond.
 |
When the yucks and struts are happening on the House floor, Bell more often than not is engrossed with his laptop computer. Sometimes he will briskly go over to a colleague’s seat to discuss an upcoming bill or confer about some other business. He offers an occasional dry quip to Del. Bill Janis (R-Henrico), who sits beside him, but he doesn’t rudely yak during session. Most delegates lunch during House sessions, but even while munching a sandwich, Bell jots notes and attends to his monitor, unlike others who spread out chips and soda and idly follow the banter on the floor.
I see him make exactly one joke during the three sessions, joshing Janis for talking too long. “Mr. Speaker, may I return to Charlottesville to get some work done?” Even that joke was not made spontaneously—he vetted it beforehand with a senior colleague to make sure it was funny before he risked wasting time in the two-month session that must get through nearly 3,000 bills and pass a budget.
Yet Bell is one of the most influential members of the House of Delegates when it comes to the real work: changing the laws, particularly those relating to criminal justice. He is a leading candidate to be the next attorney general of Virginia. How has scholarly Bell risen in the six years since he took office to be one of the biggest players in the state’s biggest playpen?
In short: because his classmates realized he did his homework—and theirs—too damn well to sideline him.
The baby sea turtle shepherd
It’s a little past 7am on a Thursday morning, and already the work of the Virginia legislature is in full swing. On the fifth floor of the General Assembly building, a small conference room is overflowing with suits and laptops and heavy binders. Subcommittee No. 2 of the Counties, Cities and Towns Committee is hashing out details on an array of bills. With the deadline to move bills to the state Senate coming in five days, it’s their final chance if the bills are to become law in 2008.
In the hallway, Rob Bell and another legislator talk over the last-minute details of House Bill 991, which he’s sponsoring in order to make transferable development rights viable for Albemarle County. As policy wonks in our area know well, the idea of a transferable development rights program was pushed last year by county Supervisor David Slutzky (a Democrat) as a way to shift rural development away from pristine Albemarle farm land and closer to the urban areas around Charlottesville and Crozet, compensating farmers in the process. Bell’s bill would allow development rights to be banked—a rural landowner could sell the right to build a house to a middle man who could then sell a bunch of them to a developer to build somewhere else. It’s a crucial component that might make the program a practical option for the county Board of Supervisors.
But big changes like that tend to worry just about everyone involved—homebuilders, realtors, landowners and environmentalists all have to figure out if they might get screwed. At the beginning of the session, Bell thought he had sorted out the details of his bill to the mutual satisfaction of all parties. But when it hit subcommittee for the first time, it was moribund.
“It seemed like we had all the groups working together, but that was all local,” says Bell. “It wasn’t translating up to their Richmond offices, and suddenly the people who I had expected to be helping with this either declined or opposed it. I just begged everybody to give me a week.”
This morning, however, the bill sails through unanimously after a mere five minutes of discussion. Reps from the the state realtors lobby, and the Albemarle County Farm Bureau have no objections and sing its praises, and when it hits the House floor five days later, it passes 97-1.
What happened in a week? A lot of talking and walking from Rob Bell. What appeared effortless was actually the product of numerous conversations with each of the stakeholders to address their lingering concerns. In the end, he worked out the compromise by limiting the bill to only Albemarle County. If it turns out to be a disaster for one of the parties—drives building costs up or leads to all the development areas choked with growth or all the development rights end up in the hands of despicable speculators—then only Albemarle County will suffer the consequences. And that was enough to appease nervous Northern Virginia reps.
“It’s much more perspiration than inspiration,” says Bell. “Most of my successes are about being diligent.”
Since taking office in 2002, Bell has patroned more than 200 bills, and about 70 have made it into law. This year, he carried 22 bills, and 13 of them passed the House.
Passing a bill is no easy task, even a simple one that seems like a no-brainer. You have to convince a subcommittee that there’s a problem, then prove that your bill solves that problem and won’t have unintended consequences that do more harm than good. Then the bill must get past committee. Then past the House. Then it has to do it all again in the Senate. Finally, Governor Kaine must sign it. Only then does it become part of the Code of Virginia.
Bell compares his bills to baby sea turtles hatching on the beach. Seagulls get some and dogs others and predators in the sea many of the rest. Only a few swim away to become laws.
The big difference, however, is that unlike the sea turtles, Bell’s bills have a vigilant shepherd to watch over them. “‘Patron’ comes from the Latin ‘patria,’ which means ‘father,’ and your legislation should really be like a brain child of yours,” says Del. Bill Janis. “When Bell’s bills have failed to get the votes necessary, it has not been for want of advocacy on the part of Rob Bell.”
That he has so many bills comes in large part because of his constituency. “Our area is extraordinarily engaged and educated and likes process,” Bell says. “There are delegates who walk in here with three or four ideas—and those are ones that come from lobbyists. I get more ideas over the transom than other people have over their career.”
Presenting many of these bills is just part of his constituent services, an area where he seems unassailable. “We work very hard on mail,” Bell says of his office, and he spends 20 hours a week when he’s not in session on constituent issues or bills that may come up.
“In terms of keeping up with his constituents, his level of constituent service is unrivaled in Richmond,” says Del. Todd Gilbert (R-Shenandoah).
Later in the day, Bell meets with Sally Thomas and Ann Mallek, supervisors from Albemarle County, and gets Congressman Virgil Goode on speakerphone to discuss the situation of the Advance Mills bridge, which has been a pain in the butt for those in the northwestern part of Albemarle County who rely on the bridge to get them into Free Union and Charlottesville. Work doesn’t start immediately on a temporary bridge, but having reps from each level talk to each other at the same time at least sorts out how to proceed.
“For 10 months of the year, [constituent service] is all you do,” Bell says. “Then you come down here and focus on legislation, but it doesn’t stop.”
The hard-headed prosecutor
But Bell is not one of those politicians who only care to curry favor with those in his district. He does not drape his ideological flag to flap in the wind of the 58th district’s opinions. While not an extremist, Bell’s stances on issues like taxes and immigration fall solidly into the conservative camp. He chaired the Albemarle County GOP before getting elected, and he worked vigorously for the Republicans in the November county elections (he himself was unopposed). Most noticeably, he’s extremely tough on crime.
Convicted criminals have every reason to hate Bell. Since taking office in 2002, he has introduced more than 120 bills that either make life easier for prosecutors, cops and victims or tougher for repeat offenders, sex offenders and violent offenders—groups that don’t have a particularly strong lobby. He votes for bills that expand capital punishment, even if he doesn’t propose them himself.
“I think he brings too much of a prosecutorial bent to the discussions,” says Del. Kenny Melvin (D-Portsmouth), Bell’s most consistent sparring partner on the criminal subcommittee. “He’s pretty hard line and rarely compromises. However, from time to time he does, and we will both note those moments because they’re so infrequent.
“I think he’s calmed down a notch,” Melvin says. “But I think he needs to take a larger world view and place himself in the position of some of the potential defendants.”
Why is Bell so tough on crime? Bell didn’t live through a traumatizing attack. He is no Bruce Wayne—his parents weren’t slaughtered before his eyes by a malicious mugger.
Bell credits his stance in the General Assembly to his days as a lowly Orange County assistant prosecutor. “That is not incidental to who I am,” says Bell. “I really liked the job. When I did it well, I thought it was doing good.”
Some opponents say that it’s political posturing, that his bills are hard to argue against and are an easy way to win points with voters.
“He has a tendency to put his name on bills that no one would have an issue with, law and order items that are fairly common sense,” says Fred Hudson, chair of the Albemarle Democratic Party.
Bell responds that what seems obvious is often only so after the fact. “I do not go through the code looking for problems,” says Bell. “Very few of the bills have not been prompted by an actual event.”
Bell’s first bill that was signed into law took away the power of a jail administrator to assign work release or electronic home monitoring. Several years earlier as a Commonwealth’s attorney, Bell had been frustrated by a local jailer who allowed a repeat felon to go on electronic home monitoring. It wasn’t hard time, he argued. Bell took the jail to court, but the judge said there was nothing Bell or the judge could do.
“That very day, I said, ‘One day I’ll see that law changed.’ By happenstance, that was the first law that I changed.”
He has plenty of other examples. “We had a terrible sex crime case where a girl was molested on the back of the bus. And because the bus was moving, they didn’t know which county it was in. Under law at the time, you couldn’t prosecute a juvenile sex crime case if they couldn’t identify the county. So we created a venue law that said it’s in the defendant’s jurisdiction. The subcommittee argued about it, and then said, ‘I don’t know why we didn’t do it some time ago.’”
A prosecutor is in many ways like a surgeon. They both try to repair the damage from an awful event. A surgeon must repair the child who has fallen off a porch and has smashed her head on the pavement below. A prosecutor must make amends for a child who has her pubic region rubbed raw from the fondling of her mother’s boyfriend. Sometimes they see the same things: A woman gets in a traffic accident. The surgeon must decide on a procedure to salvage the life. If she’s unsuccessful, then the prosecutor must decide if a manslaughter charge will salvage justice.
“If you spend much time with crime victims, I think you’ll see that the harm that even fairly modest crimes cause greatly exceeds what people think it does,” says Bell. “A simple home burglary where a guy breaks into a house, trashes the place, and takes a couple of items with him—you talk to burglary victims, and they say, ‘It doesn’t even feel like my house any more, I want to sell my house, I don’t even feel safe, I get alarm systems, I buy a gun, I buy a dog.’ And that is after a nonpersonal affront. He didn’t even touch them. You move on to the more serious offences, if you talk especially to children victims—I don’t ever want those people to be in a position where they can hurt people again.
“The rest of them, you had a lot of knuckleheads who were selfish and stupid and you hoped that by the time they got to 35 would get their act together. And your goal was to get them there with as little harm to everybody else in the world as possible. You hoped that maybe when they got out, they could stop hitting people.”
The anal-retentive wordsmith
If you really want to see why Rob Bell is ascending to the top in Richmond, watch him in action at the criminal subcommittee of the Courts of Justice.
For a rising star in the state GOP, there is no place like the criminal subcommittee to stand out. House Speaker Bill Howell (R-Stafford) came up through the ranks there, as did House Majority Leader Morgan Griffith (R-Roanoke). On other committees like Education or Science and Technology, delegates are often out of their element. But since most delegates are lawyers, the criminal subcommittee is one of the few places where legislators know intimately the subject that’s being discussed, where often they know more than the experts who testify. And in a room full of attorneys, Rob Bell blazes ahead of everyone else.
The business of the criminal subcommittee can seem esoteric and philosophical and completely removed from everyday life. Yet the words hammered out by these dozen people in a drab room under fluorescent lights make a difference for the lives of a completely different class of people. An endangered battered woman may be able to get a protective order in time because of a bill passed this session. A bill that would allow electronic recordings in abuse cases could determine whether or not a man is convicted of molesting a child.
During the subcommittee meeting I attend on February 6, the delegates hear testimony from victims of a horrific crime in May 2005, where an intruder killed several people in a house and later pleaded temporary insanity, making for several movements in the trial date. One of the survivors, who was shot in the face, chest and arm, asked for a bill to be passed so that she could get speedier closure to the case.
Yet sad stories from the criminal world don’t simply transform into new laws. More than anyone else, Rob Bell does the heavy vetting of proposed bills. He seems to delight in the task, so much so that fellow Republicans like Del. Terry Kilgore have chided him for making meetings last too long. With Code of Virginia in hand, or with a case pulled up on his computer screen, Bell relentlessly plunges into the nitty gritty. Why this word here? What about this unintended consequence? Might this allow lighter sentences for peeping toms? If you’re on the wrong side of Bell, you’ll have to withstand Bell’s amendments that could water down what you’re trying to do, or else watch the bill die in committee. (Bell has the significant advantage of being in the majority—Democrats are outnumbered on House committees and have a tough time with bills that don’t line up ideologically enough with the other side.)
“He pores through the legislation, not just looking at whether or not he likes the policy, but also whether or not the language allows us to enforce that policy,” says Janis, who also sits on the criminal subcommittee. “He’s the guy who would organize the search party for the hyphen in anal-retentive.”
“He’s meticulous, he’s detailed, he’s smart as a whip,” says Melvin. “We tease each other because I think we’re ideological opposites, but I certainly respect his intellect and the doggedness with which he advocates for his position.”
Bell does not just tear bills down—he often works as a bill fixer. During the four-hour subcommittee meeting that I watch, Bell usually points out very specifically what he doesn’t like, makes sure he understands the intention of the bill, and then makes suggestions that make it suitable for him to vote for. Even though Bell is fighting flu symptoms and has to get up regularly to hack up phlegm, none of the other dozen delegates come close to matching Bell’s acuity and attention to detail.
Del. Rosalyn Dance, a Democrat from Petersburg, puts forward a bill that allows the court to grant a restricted license to those with a suspended license so that they can get back and forth to work. Several Republican members of the subcommittee seem like they be fine just voting it down and moving on. Bell isn’t opposed to the concept, but he doesn’t want it to become a way for people to get back a license and never pay off their fines.
“This is going to be what every single person uses now,” says Bell.
Del. Ward Armstrong, a subcommittee member and the Democratic majority leader, thinks Bell is being too hard. “We’re not talking about people driving all over and going to the movies, we’re talking about getting back and forth to work so that people can feed their families,” says Armstrong.
“We already do this,” answers Bell. “[Del. Dance] said that there are people who can’t even make nominal payment. O.K., I understand that, so to give you some time to get [the court payments] in order is not an outrageous request. But unless we get them back into the same system that all the clerks are used to, we’re going to have a whole new way of doing things that is not a way for these fees ever getting paid.”
Bell wants a three-month time limit but compromises on a six-month extension, and the bill passes. Later, the bill passes the House 98-0, but without Bell, it likely would have died in subcommittee.
The next attorney general?
It was this fixer approach that helped land him the biggest appointment since coming to Richmond: chair of the mental health subcommittee that was tasked with overhauling the state system in the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy.
“I appointed him because there were about 50 different bills, all dealing with a very serious topic where there are literally life and death decisions being made,” says Del. Dave Albo (R-Fairfax), who chairs the Courts and Justice committee, by e-mail. “It had to be done right, and Bell is the most accurate attorney amongst us. So I had him head up the effort.”
“Those were long, complicated, fascinating, important, difficult hearings,” says Bell. “I’m about as proud of the work product of those hearings as about anything that we’ve done.”
Ever since Virginia Tech student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 on the Blacksburg campus, state leaders have done a lot of hand wringing about what could have been done to prevent it. Blame has gravitated to the mental health system (and, to a much lesser extent, gun laws)—a judge ordered Cho to outpatient treatment after teachers and classmates reported earlier signs of psychological problems, but Cho never went, and no one ever followed up. Many administrators were unsure what information could be passed along to parents and cops and what couldn’t. Bell’s mental health subcommittee had to hammer out what language allowed proper communication about a potential suicide or homicide threat while not planting the seeds for a police state that could hunt through medical records willy nilly.
Among those on the committee was Charlottesville’s delegate, Democrat David Toscano. “I think he did a great job as chair of that committee,” Toscano says. “I think that he tried to listen to a lot of different opinions on what was the appropriate balance to strike between protecting public safety and ensuring that people’s individual rights were secure.”
“It was absolutely nonpartisan,” says Bell, an assessment Toscano seconds. “There is no Democrat or Republican way of dealing with it. It’s going to be the first sweeping change in 30 years, and really the first real overhauls since we deinstitutionalized in the ’70s. It’s the kind of thing that I’m going to look back on when I’m in my 70s and say, ‘That was a good use of my time.’”
“Rob has single-handedly worked harder on mental health reform than anybody else in the General Assembly this year,” says Del. Todd Gilbert, R-Shenandoah. “He immersed himself in every facet on that issue, and any good bills that are going to come out of the Assembly are the result of Rob Bell and no one else.”
Bell’s performance can only help him if he decides to run for state Attorney General. The current attorney general, Republican Bob McDonnell, has announced that he will seek the nomination for governor in 2009. Richmond reporters from both The Washington Post and the Richmond Times-Dispatch have tapped Bell as a leading Republican candidate. It doesn’t hurt that he has a $377,000 war chest, according to the Virginia Public Access Project.
At this point, Bell is noncommittal about running for higher office. It will be a gamble if he does—if McDonnell loses the GOP gubernatorial nomination, Bell would probably have to back out.
It also would require a different skill set. “It would mean giving up the detail,” Bell says. “Right now, I know more about certain issue areas than staff does, which comes when you work on one issue for a long time.
“The next level up would be not even individual laws, but suites of laws, themes of laws,” says Bell. “The good thing if I got to run is that at least for a while, I’d know all the legislators. I’d know who on the courts committee is really good at which issue.”
Some legislators suggested to me that Bell, while technically minded, might not have the big-picture leadership required to be the attorney general. But Janis stands by Bell’s unusual leadership skills.
“In a sort of nerdy, anti-charismatic way, he’s one of the most authoritative people up here,” Janis says. “Long after the television cameras have gone home, long after the newspaper reporters have closed up and filed under deadline, long after the grandstanding is over with, Rob Bell will be sitting in a committee at 10:30 at night on a Friday with his sleeves rolled up getting it done. And that’s leadership, I think. Plenty of guys down here want to be somebody. There are very few guys like Rob Bell who want to do something.”
“For the same reasons I appointed him chair to the Mental Health subcommittee, I think he would be a great AG,” says Albo.
Del. Todd Gilbert thinks he would make a superb attorney general, though he is concerned about what would happen in the Courts of Justice Committee. “If he moves on to bigger and better things, we’re all wondering who will step up to fill in,” Gilbert says. “There’s really going to be a tremendous loss.”
If he either doesn’t run for or doesn’t win the attorney general job, however, Bell, who was unopposed in 2003 and 2007, will probably face stiffer competition for his seat back home.
“We’re very anxious for next year to come along because there’s already a huge amount of discussion about opposing him, and I think his district would like a strong opponent,” says Fred Hudson, chair of the Albemarle Democratic Party. “I think it’s time for him to have to explain his record to the voters of this district.”
In particular, Hudson thinks that Bell’s obstinacy on spending is an issue. “He doesn’t want to spend anything. He is an obstacle for the things that Governor Kaine is attempting to develop for the Commonwealth. Kaine carried his district, and therefore the people of his district must like a lot that Kaine has to offer, and Rob Bell is not supportive of most of those things, and as a result, we need to have a change.”
For his part, Bell is unapologetic about standing for lower taxes. “The biggest tax fight we had was in ’04, and I was convinced then and I’m convinced now that we didn’t need it.”
But even if he loses, Bell’s world won’t collapse as one imagines some politicians’ might. And rather than fleeing for the big bucks of the corporate world—a world he fled 12 years ago to become an assistant Commonwealth’s attorney in Orange County—Bell says he’d enjoy going back to being a line prosecutor. “To this day, I assume that if I get out of a position like this, I’ll go find another prosecutor job.”
This isn’t the first time that C-VILLE has written a cover story about Rob Bell. For more on his musical tastes and rise to public office, read John Borgmeyer’s 2004 story.