Abigail Spanberger says a government shutdown was “never an option.” Her own party spent three months marching the state toward one.

Ask Terry Kilgore. The House Republican Leader (R-Gate City) and his caucus had no hand in the budget that finally passed — they weren’t needed. Democrats hold the Governor’s office, the Senate, and the House.

A trifecta. No Republican veto, no divided chamber, nothing between them and an on-time budget but themselves.

They Control Everything. They Still Ran It to Eight Days.

And they missed. The regular session ended with no budget. A spring special session ended with no budget, too.

With the clock running, the House couldn’t even be bothered to come back and vote:

With 14 days until a potential state government shutdown, the Virginia House of Delegates will not return to Richmond this Thursday to vote on a state budget. https://t.co/Mq6hDQ4fLa

— WTVR CBS 6 Richmond (@CBS6) June 17, 2026

More than 100 days after lawmakers went home, the deal landed — late on a Friday night, June 19. The vote came that Monday, June 22. Eight days before Virginia would have suffered the first partial shutdown in its history.

Kilgore wouldn’t call it governing. The budget passed, he said, “but not in a manner that should make any Virginian proud” — rewritten at the last minute, loaded with policy that should have been argued in the open.

Read that again. The party that controls every lever wrote the deal in private, dropped it on the minority, and dared them to vote no with the clock at eight days.

“Never an Option” — Except the One They Chose.

Spanberger took the victory lap anyway. Failing to pass a budget, she said, “would have been unprecedented in the history of our Commonwealth — and it was never an option.”

Translation: the crisis her own party marched toward all spring was, somehow, always going to be someone else’s fault.

This isn’t divided government breaking down. It’s one party manufacturing a deadline, then billing the rescue as leadership.

They had a majority in every room and months on the calendar. They chose the cliff, then asked for credit for stepping back from it.

A shutdown doesn’t stay in the Capitol. Fairfax state workers, road projects, and the county programs that run on Richmond’s checks were all eight days from limbo — over a deal they never saw coming.

(What ended up inside the budget — the new data-center tax, the retail-cannabis market, the rest — is its own story.)

They control the Governor’s office. They control the Senate. They control the House. They still ran the clock to eight days. They own the brinkmanship, end to end.

Spanberger is term-limited — remember that in 2029. Every General Assembly Democrat who let it come to this is on the ballot in November 2027.