This transfer of power in Virginia matters more than others I’ve seen

For the first time in my life, I watched a new Virginia governor take the oath of office–not only because my schedule was mercifully free and allowed me to camp out on the couch at noon Saturday, but because the stakes for my state’s leadership are much higher now.

Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) begins her term as Virginia’s 75th governor at a much different time for the commonwealth and the nation than the last time a Democrat was sworn in as governor in front of the Capitol designed by Virginia’s second governor, Thomas Jefferson.

Gov. Ralph Northam (D) had to deal with the lies, cruelty, bigotry, and incompetence of Trump 1.0, but Spanberger faces even more of that–compounded by Trump’s newfound enthusiasm for trying to punish particular states he deems disloyal.

At its lightest, this takes the form of clumsy, oafish attempts to yank federal funding, threaten federal investigations or undo federal approvals of projects. In Virginia, we’ve seen such examples as the unsuccessful attempt to intimidate George Mason University president Gregory Washington out of office and the groundless bid to stop construction of the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project that a federal judge turned aside Friday.

At its worst, the entire country has witnessed the murderous thuggishness of ICE agents in Minneapolis who seem to take tactical inspiration from the secret police of Third World dictatorships.

And over the last year, the two elected officials in Virginia best positioned to contest these abuses of power, former Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) and former Attorney General Jason Miyares (R), either did nothing or cheered them along. Youngkin in particular appeared to think that his heel turn from maintaining a measured distance from Trump to embracing so much of a MAGA agenda would set him up well in future elections; the choices of Virginia voters in November suggest that is a delusional hope.

Hours into her term, Spanberger put some distance between herself and Youngkin’s smiling mediocrity: One of the first 10 executive orders she signed rescinds the EO of her predecessor that had directed state law-enforcement agencies to divert their time and resources to assist ICE operations.

That is a good start, and I expect more from the first Democratic governor I’ve seen take office with a Democratic majority in both houses of the General Assembly. These elected representatives have a great deal of work ahead, starting with unfinished business from the last four years in Richmond and now including finding ways to repair the damage that Trump has inflicted on our state.

#AbigailSpanberger #GlennYoungkin #GovernorSpanberger #ice #OldDominion #Richmond #Trump20 #Virginia #VirginiaDems #VirginiaGeneralAssembly #VirginiaPolitics

Gov. Youngkin touts economic, education gains in final address to Virginia General Assembly

In his final State of the Commonwealth address, outgoing Gov. Glenn Youngkin urged lawmakers not to undo core…
#NewsBeep #News #Headlines #AbigailSpanberger #glennyoungkin #UnitedStates #Us #USA #virginiageneralassembly
https://www.newsbeep.com/360913/

Virginia is not for Trump lovers

Smashing a 249-year-old glass ceiling was the least remarkable thing that Virginia voters did Tuesday. Once the Democratic and Republican parties had other candidates drop out and leave former congresswoman Abigail Spanberger and current lieutenant governor Winsome Earle-Sears as unchallenged candidates, it was assured that the Old Dominion would get its first female governor.

Which is still noteworthy, considering that the line of Virginia governors starts with Patrick Henry and then Thomas Jefferson, and yet also a tad regrettable considering that we took this long and that this happened 32 years after the commonwealth’s only other election with a woman running for governor.

But Spanberger didn’t just win but ran away with the election by more than 14 points, including support from a non-trivial fraction of 2024 Trump voters who found something to vote for her in her message of reducing the cost of living and standing up for the state against Trump’s chaos. Democratic candidates for lieutenant governor and attorney general Ghazala Hashmi and Jay Jones won by smaller margins that still outpaced many forecasts.

Yes, even AG nominee Jones, who had to grovel for forgiveness after the revelation of grotesque text messages from 2022 in which he imagined the execution of Todd Gilbert, then Republican majority leader of the House of Delegates, and the deaths by shooting of his kids.

(At least Jones apologized profusely, which is not something President Trump has ever done for any of his own deranged statements, much less the unforgiveable offense against democracy of trying to overturn the 2020 election.)

The ninth election that I’ve served as an Arlington County election officer, also the first I’d worked with the state’s top three offices on the ballot, saw equally sweeping victories for Virginia Dems in the House of Delegates.

With all 100 seats up for election, voters chose Democratic candidates in 13 previously Republican districts, turning a thin 51-seat majority into a 64-seat lock in the oldest continuous legislative assembly in the Americas–which has a great deal of unfinished business from previous sessions.

Being in the party of Trump, whose chaotic and cruel firings of government workers have left more of a dent in Virginia than in other states, seems to be political poison in far more of the commonwealth than many people expected. Especially if you try to pass off those layoffs as no big deal, as both Earle-Sears and current Republican governor Glenn Youngkin did.

These results–along with the Democratic demolition of Republican hopes in my birth state of New Jersey–should now have a lot of GOP officeholders elsewhere in the commonwealth and the country feeling nervous about their own job security. And that seems more than fair when so many voters already feel the same anxiety.

#2025Election #AbigailSpanberger #GlennYoungkin #HouseOfDelegates #OldDominion #Virginia #VirginiaGeneralAssembly #VirginiaGovernor #VirginiaPolitics #WinsomeEarleSears

𝗪𝗜𝗞𝗜𝗣𝗘𝗗𝗜𝗔'𝗦 𝗙𝗘𝗔𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗘𝗗 𝗔𝗥𝗧𝗜𝗖𝗟𝗘

✧ Daniel Boone ✧

Daniel Boone (November 2, 1734 – September 26, 1820) was an American pioneer and frontiersman. In 1775, he blazed the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky, despite resistance from Native Americans; by the end of the 18th century, more than 200,000 people had entered Kentucky by following the route...

#VirginiaGeneralAssembly #Boone #Kentucky #RevolutionaryWar #Cumberland #Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Boone

"Just spent hours debating taxes and governance with these blokes. Can't wait to see if they actually listened to anything I said 🙄 #VirginiaGeneralAssembly" - Captain John Smith

Jul 30, 1619 - In Jamestown, Virginia, the first Colonial European representative assembly in the Americas, the Virginia General Assembly, convenes for the first time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamestown%2C_Virginia

The Virginia General Assembly is now past the halfway mark of its first session under Democratic control since the 2021 session, and I have to admit that I expected a little more out of my state’s legislature now that Republicans can’t quietly sink decent bills in committees as they did in the House of Delegates in the previous two-year session.

It’s not that the Western Hemisphere’s oldest continuous law-making body–I can’t write that without noting that for the first time in its 405-year history, the House is led by a Black man, Speaker Don Scott (D.-Portsmouth)–has been spinning its wheels in this session. As of Tuesday’s “crossover day,” the deadline for each chamber to pass any non-budget bill that the other may consider, more than a thousand bills have survived that deadline in our state’s unusually short legislative session.

They include a raft of gun-control measures, some of which attracted Republican votes and may escape a veto from Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), as well as various bills to protect Virginians from the enforcement of abortion bans (you can also think of them as forced-birth laws) in other states.

Other accomplishments by either house, in some cases by both, haven’t landed in as many headlines but deserve some recognition: streamlining rural broadband buildout, ending legacy admissions to public colleges and universities, banning unadvertised junk fees, extending health care to undocumented immigrant children, and legalizing the customary cyclist practice of treating stop signs without crossing traffic as yield signs.

I also appreciate how the General Assembly hasn’t rubber-stamped Youngkin’s ploy to help the Washington Capitals and Wizards move to Alexandria’s Potomac Yards neighborhood. That arena belongs in downtown D.C. on top of multiple Metro lines.

And yet the General Assembly has still missed major opportunities–even setting aside Dems postponing votes for constitutional amendments to end felony disenfranchisement and protect same-sex marriage and abortion rights until next year’s session.

(Constituional amendments must pass in separate General Assembly sessions before going to a popular vote, so I can understand how timing them for the same year as legislative elections makes them more obvious campaign issues.)

In particular, it’s disgraceful how often Democrats have quietly sunk decent bills in committees that would have put some limits on the ability of people and even companies to throw money at politicians. Virginia’s lax campaign-finance laws amount to legalized bribery of candidates and elected officials, and Dems in Richmond should be embarrassed to have done so little to fix that. Again.

On a lesser and more local level, I’m also annoyed that a measure to allow municipalities to ban noisy and polluting gas-powered leaf blowers got punted to next year’s session. Related: It’s still dumb how often cities and counties have to get a permission slip from Richmond to do things that would have little to no effect on their neighbors.

And then there are the cases where legislators didn’t even introduce bills that should have had a chance of passing. For example, four years after we couldn’t finish an anti-SLAPP bill to close Virginia to libel tourists, nobody tried to introduce one this year. And a year after a bill to restore direct online filing of state taxes got quashed in a House committee, nobody tried to fix that either.

I’ll be thinking about that last failure when I once again file our state taxes on paper. And when I vote this fall–as I will and as I always do, because I’ve already seen how much my state has changed, one election at a time. And because however grumpy I might get about one season’s legislative results, I’m not going to practice childlike citizenship by holding my voting breath until other people do the work.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/02/16/progress-in-virginia-still-demands-some-patience/

#antiSLAPP #campaignFinance #crossoverDay #directTaxPrep #GlennYoungkin #HouseOfDelegates #leafBlowers #Richmond #VirginiaDemocrats #VirginiaGeneralAssembly #VirginiaIFile #VirginiaSenate