Republicans in the Virginia General Assembly have discovered their institutional self-respect, and their colleagues in Washington should follow their example.

In Virginia, state supreme court justices are elected by the General Assembly, which is controlled by Republicans—by an overwhelming majority in the lower chamber and a slim one in the state senate. Governor Terry McAuliffe exercised his prerogative to make a recess appointment, installing Jane Roush on the high court, and the Assembly is exercising its prerogative, announcing that upon reconvening it will not elect Judge Roush but will choose another candidate, Rossie D. Alston, an appellate judge. The Assembly has nothing but good words for Roush, and it is generally conceded that she is highly qualified and well-regarded. The Assembly simply prefers Alston, as is its right.

McAuliffe is of course in a huff. Our increasingly imperial presidency has 50 little echoes in the states, and McAuliffe is enraged that mere Virginia lawmakers would act as though they were Virginia lawmakers. Democrats complain that Alston doesn’t have a job to return to, as though uninterrupted employment in government were an entitlement for friends of the governor. Virginia’s legislature is exercising its authority and doing its duty, and its members should be commended for it.

And their example should be noted.

One of the oddities of our political life is that there is so much self-importance in Congress but so little self-respect. The encroachment of the executive into properly legislative authority—see the Obama administration’s unilateral creation of a new carbon-dioxide mandate today—is not only tolerated by Congress but encouraged by it. Among the many defects of the so-called Affordable Care Act is that it is a punt, a vague and unwieldy piece of legislation that leaves most of the real lawmaking to the bureaucracy, relying on all those “the secretary shall” arrangements. This absolves the elected legislators of taking responsibility for themselves and robs the people of their principal means of exacting accountability.

One thing that I’d like to see Congress do is to repeal the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, a relic of the progressive era’s fever for centralizing power in the executive, a law that among other things requires the president to submit an annual budget to Congress in spite of the fact that budgeting is constitutionally a congressional responsibility. Congress ought to return to regular order and reclaim its primary role in fiscal matters, funding the government through the usual dozen appropriations bills. Ideally, a Republican Congress would do this when there was a Republican president, and then decline to consider any budget proposal from the White House. (In my fantasy, this same Congress declines to convene in joint session to hear the hideously monarchical state of the union speech, inviting the president to instead follow the excellent republican custom of submitting his report in writing.) And if the president should over-aggrandize his authority under, say, the Clean Air Act, Congress has the power to put him in his place.

But that would require a more self-respecting Republican leadership in Congress and, at the moment, it would also require a Democratic congressional leadership that values our constitutional order and congressional powers more highly than it does narrow partisan considerations. So, for now, there’s no hope. But one of the many upsides of the fractious tendency among Republicans is that it is not impossible to imagine a Majority Leader Paul and a Speaker Brooks telling a President Perry to mind his own business, that they’ll write the laws and expect him to administer them.

A man can dream, can’t he?

UPDATE: This bit from the Washington Post’s account jumped out at me:

The Virginia Democratic Party said Republicans’ rejection of the female justice in favor of Alston, who is African American, is part of a pattern of “outside the mainstream” behavior.

Republicans currently hold more than twice as many seats as the Democrats in the Virginia House of Delegates; if the Democrats were more inclined toward introspection, they might ask themselves where exactly that “mainstream” they’re so fond of talking about actually is.