Bacon's Rebellion

Democracy Thrives in Sunlight

  • Oops. Wind Farm to Cost $2 Billion More

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    by James A. Bacon

    Dominion Energy’s CEO Bob Blue acknowledged yesterday that the cost of the power company’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project will cost $9.8 billion — $2 billion more than previously stated.

    During an investor conference call, Blue blamed the 25% jump on “commodity and general cost pressures” as well as completion of design plans for transmitting electricity from the wind farm through populated areas in Virginia Beach to a substation where it can plug into the grid.

    Blue said the impact on ratepayers — an extra $4 per month for an average residential customer — has not changed because the company is projecting that the wind farm will be more productive than originally thought, reports the Virginia Mercury. 

    Where have Virginians heard this before? Oh, I remember, this sounds reminiscent of the Silver Line extension of the Washington Metro to Dulles International Airport, which has encountered revised cost estimate after revised cost estimate. We can only hope that Dominion won’t encounter the same delays as the Northern Virginia commuter rail project, the second phase of which is now running about two years behind schedule. (more…)

  • Virginia’s Republican Moment

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    by Bob Rayner

    Scores of local and national media personalities are having a grand old time insulting the more than 1.6 million Virginians who elected Glenn Youngkin as our next governor. It’s the usual ignorant vitriol, spewed with such promiscuous regularity as to render it meaningless. This verdict of the people is attributed to “racism” of course, to “white grievance,” “white backlash,” “Trumpism,” “the ideology of whiteness” and so forth and so on. It’s just the nature of the “news” media these days — narrow and contemptuous.

    People of goodwill are moving past all that, and the new governor-elect is leading the way. Youngkin is a good winner, an appealing combination of strength and humility, intelligence and determination. Gov. Ralph Northam deserves congratulations for greeting his successor with grace and civility, qualities that still matter.

    Virginia Republicans have earned an opportunity to heal much of the pain and division spawned in recent years, but they must do so by emphasizing inclusion — a good word that’s been mistreated lately — and equal opportunity. Our new leaders must reach out to every kind of Virginian, while resisting the temptation to overreach the way Democrats in Washington have since January. They must emphasize pragmatic, incremental progress that improves everyday lives. (more…)

  • Making Educators Accountable for Student Outcomes

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    This is fifth in a series of articles about Virginia’s Standards of Learning assessments.

    By Matt Hurt

    In 2011 the Virginia Board of Education added a new criteria, Standard 7 Student Academic Progress, for evaluating teachers and administrators. Previously, 100% of the criteria used to evaluate educators had consisted of inputs — lesson delivery, lesson planning, school improvement planning, etc. — with no consideration of student outcomes. A teacher who arrived on time, delivered a captivating lesson during the principal’s classroom observation, and submitted impeccable lesson plans each week could receive an exemplary evaluation — even if his or her students failed to pass a minimum-competency test of grade-level standards, the Standards of Learning (SOLs), at the end of the year. Standard 7 changed the game by giving 40% weight to student outcomes.

    Even with the new measure of student outcomes, evaluations did not always correlate to student outcomes. Many divisions implemented a pre-test/post-test process, which was intended to measure student progress over the course of the year. The pre-test, consisting of content that would be covered during the year, was administered at the beginning of the year and the post-test at the end. As one would expect, students always performed better after being exposed to the material than after. Most divisions considered this improvement a sign of student growth.

    The problem with the pre-test/post-test scheme is obvious — students could “show progress” but still fail to meet the standards required to advance to the next grade. An analysis of the relationship between teacher ratings and SOL outcomes found in one division, for instance, that 45% of the teachers who had exemplary evaluation ratings and 40% with proficient ratings had fewer students passing the SOL test than is required for the school to be accredited (75% in English and 70% in other core areas). (more…)

  • Miyares Seeks to Override Progressive Prosecutors

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    by Shaun Kenney

    Attorney General-elect Jason Miyares announced Thursday that he’s looking to pass legislation that will override “social justice” commonwealth’s attorneys who refuse to prosecute entire categories of crime.

    Miyares said his plan has the support of Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin.

    Fox News reports:

    Under current law, the AG’s office can prosecute a case on behalf of a commonwealth’s attorney – Virginia’s version of a district attorney (DA) – so long as the DA requests it.

    The new bill “would essentially say, if the chief law enforcement officer in a jurisdiction — either the chief of police or the sheriff — makes a request because a commonwealth’s attorney is not doing their job, then I’m going to do their job for them,” Miyares said. “I’m thinking specifically, some of the so-called ‘social justice’ commonwealth’s attorneys that have been elected, particularly in Northern Virginia. We’re obviously aware of some pretty horrific cases” where these DAs have not pursued justice. (more…)

  • Change the Law to Attract the Best Charter School Organizations

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    by James C. Sherlock

    A key part of Governor-elect Youngkin’s campaign message was bringing more charter schools to Virginia. He wants to attract the best charter schools, and he wants to get started on day one.

    The path must start with changing Virginia law — in 2022. Fortunately there is a model law available from which to jumpstart that effort. Legislators will have to start immediately to prepare a bill for the 2022 session.

    It will take a bipartisan effort to pull it off in a way that can make the changes permanent. By “bipartisan,” I am not talking about winning one Democratic vote in the Senate. Successful charter management organizations (CMOs) won’t expand into a new territory where they see political risk.

    Bipartisanship on this issue is possible because the state of some of Virginia’s urban schools is so demonstrably horrible that they sentence children to lifelong struggles. It is exactly those children whom the best charter schools have rescued.

    There are good people on the Democratic side that will join in an effort to attract proven-successful charter management organizations to Virginia to address that issue specifically.

    The unions will squeal, but I think most Democrats in the General Assembly will look what the teachers unions did for Terry McAuliffe and choose what is best for the children. (more…)

  • Local Collective Bargaining Off to Slow Start

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    by Dick Hall-Sizemore

    Although the alarm bells have sounded repeatedly on this blog, there has not been a rush to establish public employee bargaining in Virginia. Today, about a year and a half after the General Assembly enacted the authorizing law, and six months after it went into effect, only three jurisdictions have enacted ordinances authorizing collective bargaining, with another jurisdiction, Loudoun County, scheduled to vote on an ordinance on November 10, which seems likely to pass. In contrast, at least three jurisdictions have officially said “no” to collective bargaining.

    Furthermore, none of the four collective bargaining ordinances, either adopted or pending to date, include teachers. School boards oversee the schools and will be the ones to consider collective bargaining by their employees, including teachers. So far, no local group of teachers has been authorized to engage in collective bargaining, nor has any group officially requested to do so.

    The localities are all in Northern Virginia. In addition to the pending vote in Loudoun, the city of Alexandria and the counties of Fairfax and Arlington have approved a collective bargaining ordinance. One city, Portsmouth, went as far as to have an ordinance drafted by staff, but then backed away when it came to adopting it. (more…)

  • Spanberger Speaks Truth to Power

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    Abigail Spanberger speaking at a meeting sponsored by the Problem Solvers Caucus and the Common Sense Coalition. Photo credit: Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket

    by James A. Bacon

    As Democrats come to terms with their butt-whooping in Virginia and their near-death experience in New Jersey, they’ve been asking themselves what went wrong. Predictably, pundits from the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato to MSNBC’s Joy Reid have interpreted the shellacking as a racist White backlash. This delusional bubble-think is a recipe for continued Democratic electoral failure. Luckily for Democrats, they have Rep. Abigail Spanberger, representing my home congressional district, to set them straight.

    The New York Times quoted Spanberger in its election wrap-up yesterday.

    “We were so willing to take seriously a global pandemic, but we’re not willing to say, ‘Yeah, inflation is a problem, and supply chain is a problem, and we don’t have enough workers in our work force,’” said Representative Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia Democrat facing a bruising re-election. “We gloss over that and only like to admit to problems in spaces we dominate.”

    (more…)

  • College Faculty Don’t “Think Like America”

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    by James A. Bacon

    It has become a widespread conviction on Virginia’s colleges and universities that faculty and staff should “look like Virginia” in their demographic make-up. There is no comparable obsession with hiring faculty and staff that “think like Virginia.”

    Employees of James Madison University — faculty, staff, and administrators — donated more than $148,000 to Democratic Party candidates and political committees between November 2018 and November 2020, according to research conducted by Campus Reform. In other words, 92.9% of all JMU employees who made political donations gave to Democratic candidates or Democratic-aligned organizations such as Act Blue and Biden for President. Conversely, only 7.90% of campus money went to right-leaning candidates and organizations.

    And that makes JMU the most conservative of the three public universities researched.

    Radford University employees donated $46,003 to the Left side of the political spectrum compared to $3,660 to the conservative side — 94.0% compared to 6.0%. (more…)

  • What Did Democrats Learn from Tuesday’s Spanking?

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    by Kerry Dougherty

    And the news just keeps getting better.

    Seems Democrats learned next to nothing from Tuesday’s spanking in Virginia. Turn on any cable news network — except Fox — and pundits on the left are declaring Glenn Youngkin’s victory a win for racism. They can’t stop yapping about white supremacy, culture wars and dog whistles.

    MSNBC’s Joy Reid, for instance.

    “You have to be willing to vocalize that these Republicans are dangerous,” Reid said on MSNBC Live on Election Night. “That this isn’t a party that’s just another political party that disagrees with us on tax policy… at this point, they’re dangerous. They’re dangerous to our national security because stoking that kind of soft white nationalism eventually leads to the hardcore stuff.”

    Lieutenant Governor-Elect Winsome Sears — the first black woman elected to statewide office in Virginia, the first immigrant AND a Republican — would like a word with the cable news ignoramus. (more…)

  • Personnel is Policy On Future Energy Reform

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    SCC Commissioner Angela Navarro, whose term ends January 31, 2022.

    by Steve Haner

    Does Tuesday’s election result mean Virginia is going to move back towards a rational energy policy? Watch two key personnel decisions, both entirely matters for the next legislature to decide.

    State Corporation Commissioner Angela Navarro was elected by the 2021 General Assembly to fill the unexpired term of Mark Christie, who moved to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. His SCC term was expiring January 31, 2022, so hers does too, putting her up for reconsideration immediately.

    A former staff lawyer for the Southern Environmental Law Center, she was an architect and advocate for the 2020 Virginia Clean Economy Act. Key decisions on that are beginning to fill the SCC docket, the largest being the next Dominion integrated resource plan and the first tranche of offshore wind development.

    Will the new Republican majority in the House of Delegates deny Navarro a full term and choose another judge less associated with that bill? Well, the oldest rule in the legislature is “what goes around comes around.” When the Democrats took full control of the Assembly in the 2020 session, former Commissioner Patricia West was seeking an extension on her partial SCC term that began in 2019.

    She was denied that extension, and instead replaced by Jehmal T. Hudson, who had been serving at FERC in a staff position. (more…)

  • How the WaPo’s Epic Fail on Schools Helped Elect Youngkin

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    Loudoun County parents pack a School Board meeting. Photo credit: Idiocracy News Media

    by James A. Bacon

    The national news media are full of commentary today analyzing the implications of the Republican sweep of statewide offices in Virginia. Almost all focus on Glenn Youngkin’s deft exploitation of the culture wars playing out in the state’s public schools, especially in Northern Virginia.

    Youngkin does indeed deserve credit for harnessing the parents’ rebellion against “critical race theory.” Parents of school children shifted decisively from McAuliffe to Youngkin during the campaign. But there’s a big piece of the story that everyone is missing: how conservative media established the narrative of “critical race theory” and made it a top-tier issue in the election, catching the Washington Post flat-footed in the year’s biggest political story unfolding in its own back yard.

    Scrappy conservative publications have long served as a counter to the dominant liberal media. They have served as a partial antidote to the dominant progressive narratives of our time, plugging voids in mainstream coverage by filling in “the other side of the story.” But they always played defense. This is the first time I can recall in which conservative media seized upon a narrative and drove an issue that decisively influenced a statewide election. (more…)

  • Virginia Voters Chose Hope Over Fear

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    by Kerry Dougherty

    Was it the months of ugly race-baiting? The profound, unrelenting negativity of the Terry McAuliffe campaign? The lies that fell so easily from the Democrat’s lips? Stacey Abrams? Randi Weingarten? Kamala Harris’ illegal church video? The out-of-state money flowing into Virginia campaigns? The tedious references to Trump? The ghoulish enthusiasm for abortion? The tiki torches?

    Or was it simply the positivity of the Glenn Youngkin campaign? The ability of the candidate to stay on message and not take McAuliffe’s bait? Was it Youngkin’s focus on issues that affect ordinary people: Taxes, schools, safety? Was it his promise that Virginia has brighter days ahead, without fear of more unconstitutional shutdowns and mandates? Was it his pledge that as governor he’d make sure Virginia school children would learn American history — the good AND the bad — without being taught to hate each other because of their race. (more…)

  • Day One Powers of the Governor – Removal of Members of Boards and Commissions

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    Glenn Youngkin Photo Credit: NBC News

    by James C. Sherlock

    The left routinely reminds us that elections have consequences.

    Well, indeed they do.

    People ask what can Glenn Youngkin really do on day one of his administration. The answer — more and more consequentially — than is commonly understood.

    I have written here repeatedly about long term corruption in the Board of Health and rigid and relentless progressivism in the Board of Education.

    Those boards are very powerful in Virginia. They are charged with both writing regulations and oversight of the underlying departments. The current members of those boards need to go — en masse.

    The new governor has the power to make that happen. (more…)

  • Larry Sabato Is the One Living in a “Post-Factual” World

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    by James A. Bacon

    Larry Sabato has lost it. There was a time early in his career when the University of Virginia political science professor paid close attention to Virginia politics and spoke insightfully about it. But as he grew ever more successful as an author, director of the UVa Center for Politics, and a nationally quoted pundit, he increasingly became an observer of the national scene. As his focus became more national in scope, he lost touch with Virginia — at least the Virginia that lay outside the bubble of the Peoples’ Republic of Charlottesville — and he adopted the frame of reference common to the Washington Post, New York Times, cable news outlets, and Leftist punditocracy generally.

    Sabato’s disconnect from Virginia political reality was abundantly clear in a series of interviews he gave MSNBC on election day.

    When asked how Virginia could have swung from electing Joe Biden by a 10-point margin to giving an edge to Republican Glenn Youngkin, the Sage of Charlottesville noted Biden’s declining popularity and the Congressional Democrats’ circular firing squad. But, ultimately, he said, the gubernatorial election in Virginia was all about race. (more…)

  • The GOP Sweeps the Elections, but the Battle Has Just Begun

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    by James A. Bacon

    Having swept the statewide offices and recaptured a majority in the House of Delegates, the Republicans are back in power in Richmond. At last Virginians have a chance to correct the follies and excesses of the Northam administration.

    Republicans should enjoy the moment and bask in their victory. The post-election high will last until Jan. 15 when Governor Glenn Youngkin, Attorney General Jason Miyares, Lieutenant Governor Winsome Sears, and the newly elected delegates take their oaths of office. By Jan. 16, to paraphrase B.B. King, the thrill will be gone. Democrats may have lost the election, but they have not surrendered.

    Let’s recapitulate a few facts. While the election did vault the GOP back into power, it did so by narrow margins. Youngkin won with 50.7% of the vote. That is a slim majority, not a mandate. Miyaris and Sears won by nearly identical margins. Meanwhile, the Republicans will govern the House with a narrow 52- to 48-seat majority, while Democrats will retain a tenuous control of the state Senate. (more…)