Good riddance to Ralph

Time is finally up for Ralph Northam as governor of Virginia. Today, Glenn Youngkin replaced him.

Had Northam been a Republican, his time might have been up two years ago, after it was discovered that he once dressed up in black face and he admitted doing so (Northam later tried to weasel his way out of this admission). And there were, in fact, loud calls from some Democrats for Northam to resign.

But the racial-reckoning race-hustling movement wasn’t all that bothered by Northam’s long-ago transgression because it saw an opportunity. It saw that Northam would likely push through much of the movement’s radical race-based agenda to “atone” for his youthful indiscretion. The fact that Virginia’s other two statewide elected officials, a pair of Democrats, had scandals of their own didn’t hurt Northam’s survival prospects, either.

Northam, elected as something of a centrist, ended up delivering much of the left’s agenda. He abolished the death penalty, facilitated voting fraud, expanded Medicaid, and legalized marijuana.

After selectively reading some black history, he formed a commission to review how that history is taught in schools, thus paving the way for indoctrination of students in Critical Race Theory. He appointed the first Cabinet-level diversity officer in any U.S. state, and charged her with pushing for race-based hiring and promotion practices.

He issued around 1,200 pardons to criminals, compared to only about 200 by Terry McAuliffe, who held the previous Virginia record. He even endorsed something that seems dangerously close to infanticide.

It’s no surprise, then, that Northam leaves office with high praise from the left, including the Washington Post. And from himself. Northam has pronounced himself “a better person” than when he took office. He added, “I think Virginia’s a better Commonwealth.”

The Commonwealth doesn’t agree. Its voters elected a Republican governor for the first time in three elections and only the second time in six. A state strongly trending “Blue” now seems up for grabs again.

This week, in his final state of the Commonwealth address, Northam urged the General Assembly to embrace the spirit of unity and inclusiveness, and to eschew hyper-partisanship. Translation: Please leave don’t overturn the radical, hyper-partisan policies I rammed through when my party held power.

The new speaker of the Virginia House had an appropriate response. Todd Gilbert tweeted:

Ralph Northam is leaving office as his own lost cause, condescendingly lecturing us all from some assumed moral high ground because he read the book “Roots” and then went on a non-stop reconciliation tour. Saturday can’t come fast enough.

Unfortunately, Democrats still control the Virginia Senate. Thus, there will be limits to what Youngkin and the House can do.

But they can do plenty, and should. They should attack Northam’s radical policies with the same relentlessness that Northam and his party imposed them when they held power.