Two Democratic state senators arrived at a ceremonial gun violence prevention bill signing in Virginia on Tuesday expecting to see their own legislation honored. Instead, a staffer for Gov. Abigail Spanberger reportedly pulled them into a hallway and told them their bills had been stripped from the event, because they had dared to join a fellow Democrat's listening tour on data center tax breaks.

The incident, first reported by the Virginia Scope, marks the sharpest escalation yet in an intra-party fight that now threatens Virginia's ability to pass a budget before state funding expires June 30. The Daily Caller reported that state Sens. Mike Jones and Russet Perry had reserved, named seats at the signing before the governor's office moved to exclude them.

Virginia House Speaker Don Scott, also a Democrat, told The Roanoke Times that state Sen. Louise Lucas, the lawmaker leading the data center listening tour, had sparked "a civil war among Democrats." That phrase is doing a lot of work. But the facts underneath it tell a simpler story: a governor who controls the bill-signing pen used it to punish members of her own party for asking questions she didn't want asked.

What happened at the signing

Multiple sources with knowledge of the situation told the Virginia Scope that Jones and Perry were present at the event and seated in reserved spots bearing their names. Before the signing began, a Spanberger staffer asked them to step into the hallway. There, the staffer informed them that the governor had removed their bills from the ceremony.

The stated reason: their participation in Lucas's "data center listening tour" across the state.

Both senators left before Spanberger delivered her remarks. The Virginia Scope confirmed they were present before the signing but absent by the time the governor spoke. The Daily Caller reached out to Spanberger, Jones, and Perry for comment but received no response before publication.

Perry, however, spoke to the Virginia Scope. She did not hold back about the governor's conduct, though she kept her tone measured.

"It's a shame the governor decided to take these actions today. I've never been publicly critical or disparaging of her and genuinely wish her the best. But it is my job as a senator, in a coequal branch, to fight for my constituents. And I'm not going to stop listening to them and working for them, especially on issues as important in my district as data centers."

That quote tells you everything about the power dynamic at play. A state senator who says she has never publicly criticized her governor now finds her legislation yanked from a signing ceremony because she attended a listening tour. Not because she voted against the governor. Not because she blocked a bill. Because she listened to constituents.

The $1.6 billion question behind the feud

The data center tax fight is not a minor policy squabble. Virginia's current sales and use tax exemption for data centers costs the state approximately $1.6 billion in lost revenue, according to the Virginia Department of Accounts' Annual Comprehensive Financial Report for FY2025. The exemption is set to expire in 2035 under current law.

Lucas wants to end it far sooner, by January 2027. She has been publicly clashing with Spanberger over the issue for weeks, posting on X that the governor needed to "be honest" and "tell the public" that "she won't tax billion dollar corporations to provide long term revenue to help pay for K12 and public safety and to backfill the federal cuts from Trump."

Lucas also labeled Spanberger a "Data Center Diva" on X after negotiations over the tax breaks stalled at a budget meeting.

Spanberger and Speaker Scott, by contrast, favor keeping some version of the tax break in place with new conditions and limitations rather than a full repeal. The policy disagreement is real. But the governor's response, reportedly punishing senators who simply participated in a tour examining the issue, suggests the dispute has moved well past policy and into raw political retaliation.

A budget on the brink

The timing makes the feud worse. Virginia's House of Delegates canceled a special session that was set for Thursday to approve the state's fiscal year 2027, 2028 budget. If the legislature cannot reach a budget compromise, Virginia's funding runs out June 30.

That deadline is twelve days away. And the Democratic majority that controls both chambers and the governor's mansion is spending its time publicly feuding over who gets invited to bill signings.

Spanberger's tenure has already been marked by friction. Her approval rating has sunk to historic lows amid fights over redistricting and new taxes. The data center dispute now threatens to become the defining crisis of her early governorship, not because the underlying policy question is unanswerable, but because her office chose confrontation over persuasion.

Consider the sequence. Lucas launched a listening tour. Two senators joined it. The governor's office reportedly responded by stripping those senators' bills from a public ceremony and escorting them out of the room. Whatever message that sends to Lucas, it also sends a message to every other Democratic legislator in Richmond: cross the governor, even by listening to the wrong colleagues, and your work disappears from the agenda.

Democrats governing Democrats

This is what single-party governance looks like when the party cannot manage its own disagreements. Virginia Democrats hold the governor's mansion, the state Senate, and the House of Delegates. There is no Republican blocking their agenda. There is no divided government forcing compromise with the opposition. Every failure to govern is an internal failure.

The data center tax exemption is a legitimate policy debate. Reasonable people can disagree about whether a $1.6 billion annual revenue loss is worth the economic activity data centers bring. Lucas has a point about the scale of the giveaway. Spanberger and Scott may have a point about the risks of a sudden repeal.

But none of that justifies using a gun violence prevention bill signing, an event meant to highlight public safety legislation, as a vehicle for settling an unrelated political score. The senators whose bills were removed had their work on gun violence policy erased from a public event. Whatever those bills contained, they had nothing to do with data centers.

Spanberger has also drawn criticism for her approach to revenue more broadly. She has refused to rule out taxes on gym memberships and streaming services, adding to a sense among Virginians that the new governor's instinct is to tax first and explain later.

Meanwhile, the Democratic infighting in Virginia echoes broader fractures within the party nationally. Even figures like Sen. John Fetterman have broken with party leadership on Virginia redistricting, calling the Democrats' new map a loss for everyone. When your own members are publicly dissenting on basic governance questions, the problem is not one rogue senator on a listening tour.

The open questions Spanberger won't answer

Several important facts remain unknown. Spanberger's office has not confirmed or denied that the staffer removed Jones and Perry's bills because of the data center listening tour. The governor did not respond to the Daily Caller's request for comment. Jones has not spoken publicly about the incident beyond what the Virginia Scope reported.

The identity of the staffer who delivered the message is also unknown. So are the specific bills that were removed from the signing, and the specific gun violence prevention laws that were signed.

Those gaps matter. If Spanberger's office has a different explanation for why two senators were escorted out of a bill signing where their names were on reserved seats, the public deserves to hear it. Silence, in this case, reinforces the version of events that multiple sources described to the Virginia Scope.

Erik Telford, posting on X, summarized the scene bluntly: "Spanberger invited two Dem lawmakers to a bill signing. Reserved seats with their names on them. Waited until they arrived. Then had a staffer escort them into the hallway and tell them to leave."

Even allowing for the possibility that some details remain in dispute, the core facts are damning enough. Two Democratic senators showed up. Their names were on seats. They were pulled aside and told their legislation was gone. They left.

A party that can't govern itself

Virginia Democrats promised voters competent, unified leadership. What they have delivered instead is a governor reportedly using ceremonial events as punishment, a state senator calling the governor a "Data Center Diva" on social media, a House speaker describing his own party's condition as a "civil war," and a budget deadline less than two weeks away with no deal in sight.

The pressures straining the Democratic coalition are not limited to Virginia. But Virginia is where those pressures are producing the most visible dysfunction right now, because Virginia is where Democrats have no one else to blame.

If the state runs out of funding on June 30, it will not be because Republicans blocked a budget. It will be because the party that holds every lever of power in Richmond could not stop fighting long enough to use them.

When you can't even share a bill-signing table with your own caucus, governing the rest of the state is probably too much to ask.