Governor Abigail Spanberger and Senator Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth) have spent three months unable to agree on a state budget. Both are Democrats. So is nearly everyone else at the table.

Democrats hold the Governor’s office, the Senate, and the House of Delegates. They failed to pass a budget during the regular session. They failed again at a special session in April. The fiscal year ends June 30, and they still have no deal.

One-Party Rule Was Supposed to Make Government Work. Virginia Is About to Prove the Opposite.

The fight is Democrat versus Democrat. Lucas and the Senate want to end a tax break for data center developers now. Spanberger and the House, led by Speaker Don Scott (D-Portsmouth), want to keep it in place.

The break itself is a state sales-tax exemption for data centers — the server warehouses spreading across Northern Virginia. The Senate wants to start ending it early. The House and the Governor do not. That is the whole fight.

Spanberger’s position: “I’m not going to break a contract the state has signed.” The Senate’s position is the opposite. Three months later, neither side has moved.

Nobody in Richmond Is Acting Like an Adult. Fairfax Families Get the Bill.

If there is no budget by July 1, Virginia faces a partial government shutdown — potentially the first in its history. State money for transportation, schools, and human services would be left in limbo.

A shutdown would not be an abstraction. State workers, road projects, and the local programs that lean on Richmond’s checks would all be caught in the gap — on July 1, in the middle of summer.

Even Fairfax’s own Democrat Board Chairman, Jeff McKay, sees it. “This is not a trivial issue — it’s not the way a state like Virginia should be acting,” he said.

Spanberger says not to worry — there will be a budget by the end of the month, and no shutdown. Virginians have heard that before. The last deadline these Democrats promised to meet was in April.

This is what one-party rule looks like when the cameras are off. Spanberger, Lucas, and Don Scott run all of Richmond, and they cannot do the one job — pass a budget — that keeps the state open. They have until July 1 to grow up.

Every seat in the Virginia Senate and House of Delegates is on the ballot in November 2027. The question for Fairfax is simple: if Democrats can’t run the government when they control all of it, what exactly is one-party rule for?