Since being elected to the General Assembly in November, Delegate David “Tax Pig” LaRock has been doing exactly what we would have expected of the man opposed to Rail to Dulles: Proposing bills to kill off badly needed transportation projects in Loudoun and Northern Virginia. Though couched as legislation to correct funding injustices (“injustices,” it must be noted, that were discussed, debated, legislated, and adjudicated through proper small “d” democratic processes over the course of many years), the practical impact of these bills would be to kill all the life that has been breathed in to transportation fixes in Loudoun over the past few years. Life only made possible by the painstaking, difficult, bi-partisan, efforts of leaders like Mark Herring.

Perhaps most egregious are his bills to arbitrarily reduce the allocation of funding to mass transit in favor of more roads. (Bacon’s Rebellion has a right-leaning, but generally evenhanded analysis of these bills.) That’s right, roads over transit, because conservative.

It had been my plan to try to compose a few more paragraphs of analysis of the bills in question. But really, the impracticality and obstinacy of the philosophy underpinning them can only be summarized thusly:

It is equally exasperating to note the only other bills LaRock has sponsored are to codify a tax credit (not a deduction, a credit) for home and private schooling, which serves to gut public education funding, and bills to simplify the process of transferring ownership of guns from one person to another.

Notably absent from Mr. LaRock’s list of sponsored bills? Any bill helping maintain open space in his District. Or helping farmers. Or addressing the unique needs of small school communities in the west. Or dealing with the water issues his constituents in Raspberry Falls have faced. Or, frankly, any bill not directly birthed by some narrow-minded, right-wing talking point.

Because conservative.