At the Charlottesville conclave, Andrews, who left the Senate

At the Charlottesville conclave, Andrews, who left the Senate in the mid 1990s, said legislators over the past few years have worked overtime on partisanship and made too little time for friendships.

And that, I think, is true, the inevitable outcome of not only the surge in ranks of the Republican Party but the infusion into the legislature of many ideologues with little interest in socializing and totally committed to advancing their social agenda.

Back in the early 1980s when George Allen came to Richmond as a young member of the House of Delegates from Albemarle County, he was personally congenial to all of his fellow legislators but a man with a conservative mission.

Allen was seldom seen on the social circuit, preferring to spend his time closely examining each of the thousands of pieces of legislation introduced each year. In retrospect, I think Allen who became a member of Congress and then governor was one of those principally responsible for a change in tone within the General Assembly.

By that, I mean that as the two parties gradually reached parity, the Republican members became more like old time conservative Democrats while the Democrats came to more closely reflect the agenda of the national Democratic Party.

So it came to pass that relations between Democratic and Republican members of the legislature became more like those in the U. S. Congress. Each side respected the others as individuals but fought bitterly against their philosophy so there was less and less common ground for friendly bipartisan socializing.

In recent General Assembly sessions there has been an increased sense of warfare between not only the two parties but between the Republican majority in the House and their counterpart Republican majority in the Senate. This year’s session resulted in Chichester, powerful head of the Senate Finance Committee, becoming the prime target of anti tax GOP elements in the House who suggested he leave the party.