After defeating scandal-plagued Republican Delegate Phil Hamilton in 2009, Virginia Democrats made ethics reform a priority in the 2010 session. Yesterday, despite their minority status in the House, Democrats successfully passed an ethics overhaul authored by DLCC Finance Chairman and State House Minority Leader Ward Armstrong.

But while Armstrong is credited with writing the legislation, it was truly a team effort among House and Senate Democrats:

Armstrong, a Democrat from Henry County, said the Hamilton case demonstrated that the Assembly's self-policing system is broken and the voters expected it to be fixed.

"The next time something like that happens - and it will - we'll have a mechanism in place to deal with it," he said.

Armstrong's bill incorporated proposals from Del. Robin Abbott of Newport News, the Democrat who unseated Hamilton. She ran on a platform that included ethics reform.

"I'm very pleased" by the Senate vote, Abbott said Wednesday. "It gives us some transparency in the process, and it also provides protection against frivolous complaints. I got everything I wanted."

The vote was a vindication of sorts for Sen. Ralph Northam, a first-term Democrat from Norfolk, who sponsored a companion bill that closely tracked the Armstrong measure and was unexpectedly shelved by a House committee last week.

Senate Republicans voted en-mass for the bill on final passage, but not before trying to kill the bill on a technicality. All 18 Republicans voted for an amendment that made a “minor wording change” that did not affect the substance of the bill. Had the amendment passed, the bill would have gone back to the House of Delegates, where the Republican majority could have quietly let the measure die.

Democratic senators voted unanimously to keep the decision in the Senate’s hands, and because of their narrow majority, the bill now awaits the governor’s signature.