Category: General Assembly
-
Cutting Off One’s Nose To Spite One’s Face
by Dick Hall-Sizemore The Virginia Senate Democrats have acted irrationally. They have refused to confirm four of the five appointments made by Governor Youngkin to the Parole Board. This action was in retaliation for the House refusing to confirm 11 appointments made by then-Governor Northam last year, including those to the Board of Education and…
-
Virginia Democrats Play Childish Games With Public Safety
by Kerry Dougherty What in the world are Virginia Senate Democrats thinking? On Thursday, in a childish game of tit-for-tat, these partisan hacks blocked three of Governor Glenn Youngkin’s nominees for the state parole board. There was nothing objectionable about the trio. This was political gamesmanship and a fresh reminder that Democrats have little interest…
-
Virginia Remains a Green New Deal Mecca
by Steve Haner The elections of a Republican Virginia governor and a new Republican majority in the House of Delegates have not changed Virginia’s status as one of the greenest of Green New Deal states in the country. Every effort to reverse the course set during the previous period of Democratic hegemony has failed at…
-
What? The General Assembly Is Still Meeting?
by Dick Hall-Sizemore Jeff Shapiro has a nice column in today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch praising the work of the Bob Brown, the long-time news photographer who is retiring, after 42 years at the RTD, at the end of this month. His photographs have captured many moments in the legislature over the years and he is a…
-
A Narrative About Virginia’s Rural Hospitals that Obscures the Facts
by James C. Sherlock Becker’s Healthcare, a widely read medical news organization, published a story on Friday, “892 hospitals at risk of closure, state by state.” Rural hospitals were the topic. It cited as its source a report from a non-profit named The Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform (CHQPR), which presents itself as…
-
More Burdens on Teachers
by Dick Hall-Sizemore The General Assembly has passed legislation (SB 656, Dunnavant, R-Henrico) that would require schools to notify parents of “any instructional material that includes sexually explicit content” and permit parents to review such instructional material. Furthermore, the instructor would be required to “provide, as an alternative, nonexplicit instructional material and related academic activities…
-
Primary Care Shortages in Virginia and an HEZ solution
by James C. Sherlock I have written here and in newspapers across the state with a recommendation that Virginia emulate Maryland in the establishment of Health Enterprise Zones (HEZs) to bring primary care to Virginia communities that lack sufficient access to treat people before their conditions require hospitalization. Here I will provide data on Virginia…
-
We Need to Help That Poor Billionaire Out
by Dick Hall-Sizemore With all the huffing and puffing about CRT, face masks, and “wokeism” at UVa, Bacon’s Rebellion has ignored what could be the biggest scam in the General Assembly: the subsidization of an ultrarich guy and his plan to build a football stadium and surrounding “mini-city” in Northern Virginia. The General Assembly is…
-
“But, It’s Not a Perfect Bill. I Can’t Support That”
by Dick Hall-Sizemore Once again, the General Assembly has killed legislation that would prohibit politicians from using campaign donations to cover personal expenses. It is easy to express outrage at this almost annual occurrence, but, in doing some background research on the subject, I encountered some details that, on the one hand, provide a fuller…
-
How Do We Pay to Fix the Schools?
by James A. Bacon It has long been recognized that some of Virginia’s public schools are in scandalously poor condition — leaky roofs, mold, asbestos, outdated HVAC systems, clogged toilets, and so on. More than half of all school buildings in the state are greater than 50 years old. In mid-2021, school districts across Virginia…
-
Still Time to Limit Governor’s Emergency Powers
by Barbara Hollingsworth First published this morning by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. Should the governor of Virginia have the power to unilaterally declare an open-ended state of emergency that indefinitely restricts Virginians’ civil and constitutional rights without a recorded vote by the General Assembly? The COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns raised this serious question.…
-
Virginia’s Greens Need an Epiphany
by James C. Sherlock Headlines from the war in Ukraine have raised exponentially the interest in natural gas and the extreme price volatility caused by supply constraints. It is perhaps useful to understand the uses of natural gas, the prices Virginians pay relative to West Virginians, the decline of production in Virginia, and the costs…
-
Fairfax County Also Prepared to Move Against Gas
by Steve Haner It was a Richmond City Council resolution back in the fall, expressing a desire to shut down its municipal natural gas utility, that triggered pending (and now struggling) Virginia legislation to prevent localities from prohibiting natural gas. Less attention has been given to the “climate action” plan by Virginia’s largest local government…
-
Big Gas Users Protect Selves, Abandon Home Users
by Steve Haner Divide and conquer is an ancient tactic. Virginia’s residential natural gas customers were just divided from industrial and commercial users, and those big users then threw homeowners under the bus. Without blinking an eye. House Bill 1257 had passed the House of Delegates on an almost party line vote, with two Democrats…
-
Committee Kills Bill to Release “Good Behavior” Murderers
by Hans Bader Voting along party lines, a legislative committee in Virginia’s Republican-controlled House of Delegates voted 5-to-3 yesterday to kill a bill that would have allowed a large proportion of the state’s murderers to seek release from prison. The bill, SB 378, would have allowed Virginia prison inmates to seek release from prison after…