From federal investigations, to wonky deals with Chinese investors, to allegedly seeing the Khashoggi assassination, Terry McAuliffe may have to answer a barrage of odd questions when he officially announces his presidential run.
Two Republican Bills Set To Levy Bigger Penalties Against Annoying ‘Spoofing’ Calls
The legislation would place greater punishments on telephone spammers, adding the practice of spoofing to the Virginia Telephone Privacy Protection Act (VTPPA).
Bill to Verify Voter Citizenship Advances out of Committee
When Senator Mark Peake (R-Lynchburg) first ran for office in 2015, he said Virginia needed more lawmakers focused on solving problems with common sense. This session, he’s fighting for a bill which he says does exactly that.
Peake introduced SB1038 to require voter registrars throughout Virginia to electronically verify the name, date of birth, and social security number of each voter against existing federal databases to confirm that every registered voter is a citizen of Virginia and the United States.
Calling it a “very simple bill” and “very common sense”, Peake urged the committee to pass the measure, which he said would strengthen election integrity in Virginia and help fight voter fraud.
“I just kind of would like to make sure that people who are registered to vote in Virginia are actually Virginia citizens and the people they say they are,” he said.
Peake noted his legislation would cost less than a million dollars, contrasting the fiscal impact of the bill with the much larger sums of money spent every year on campaigns in Virginia.
“We’re talking about less than a million dollars to make sure that people who register to vote in the Commonwealth of Virginia are actually citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia and are actually the people they say they are. That’s my bill,” Peake added, following a short presentation.
On Wednesday, Peake’s bill advanced out of the Senate’s Finance Committee, following an earlier favorable recommendation by the committee on Privileges and Elections, which handles election-related legislation. The legislation advanced out of Finance on a party line vote, with all Republicans in favor and all Democrats opposed, after passing out of Privileges and Elections with bipartisan support, when Senator Lionel Spruill (D-Chesapeake) broke ranks with his party to support the bill.
During Wednesday’s hearing, no representatives from the Department of Elections came to speak for or against the bill.
Following a short presentation, the committee, with Peake’s blessing, adopted an amendment giving registrars until 2021 to implement the legislation. This amendment, observers said, was necessary to give localities time to implement the electronic verification in their computer systems, as well as move the bill’s modest implementation cost beyond the current budget cycle, a move intended to put the law on the books and protect its passage against the possibility of becoming caught up in a larger budget dispute over Governor Northam’s proposal to increase spending and taxes this year.
While Northam has not indicated whether he would sign the legislation, the governor has shown disdain for other election integrity measures, calling for a repeal of Virginia’s voter ID law in his annual State of the Commonwealth address, in which he also called for higher spending, sweeping gun control, and creating a “fundamental right” to abortion, including late term abortions in the third trimester.
Northam’s opposition comes in spite of public polling showing voter ID measures to be very popular. According to Gallup, four in five Americans support voter ID laws.
Peake’s bill will now be heard by the full Senate, which favored the measure last year. If passed, it would need to gain approval in the House of Delegates before heading to the governor’s desk.
Virginia’s Democratic Legislators Pushing In-State Tuition For DACA Recipients
For example, at Virginia Commonwealth University, DACA recipients living in Virginia would only have to pay $14,490 in tuition and fees, much less than the $35,798 price tag for out-of-state students.
Senate Set To Vote On Likely Failing Bills To Reopen Federal Government
With day 33 of the partial government shutdown in the books, the Senate has scheduled votes on Thursday in the first attempt of such since federal funding an out at midnight on December 21, 2018. However, funding packages from both parties in power are likely to fail to meet the 60-vote threshold in the Senate to end the impasse, which is under 53-47 Republican control.
Both bills would reopen nine federal agencies and dole out paychecks to 800,000 government employees, but the similarities end there.
Under the Republican plan, $5.7 billion would be allocated to building the U.S.-Mexico border wall (or barrier) in “strategic locations” and, per President Trump‘s remarks, provide for a three-year extension of protections for over 700,000 undocumented immigrants shielded from deportation under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Trump’s funding request also includes $800 million for humanitarian assistance, $805 million for drug detection technology, 2,750 more border agents and law enforcement officers, and 75 more immigration judges.
Democrats, on the other hand, have continued to work on a package that would ignore the president’s demand for $5.7 billion for a southern border wall and would instead allocate funds for other ideas aimed at protecting the border, what they call a “21st Century plan.” Although the Democratic Party’s border security plan and its costs remain a work in progress, it is said to include money for scanning devices and other advanced technological tools to bolster security at certain ports of entry at the southern border, as well as money for additional border agents and immigration judges.
Even if the Senate were to pass either plan, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (CA-12) has already scheduled to send the lower chamber home on Friday, ensuring that the shutdown will continue into next week. Moreover, it will fuel more animus in Republicans that the speaker and her party are not as interested as they say in reopening the government and sending hundreds of thousands of people back to work.
Nevertheless, in the consistent fighting between the Democratic leader of the House of Representatives and the Republican president, the State of the Union address next week has been postponed. Trump yielded to the speaker after a week-long showdown that featured the commander in chief cancelling a trip commissioned by Pelosi and a select group of congressional Democrats to Belgium, Egypt, and Afghanistan, calling the “seven-day excursion” an unnecessary “public relations event.”
White House officials have considered a backup plan to have President Trump give the speech at an alternate location if majority Democrats block the House chamber. Regardless, as the length of the shutdown is now unprecedented, Pelosi could break another bureaucratic paradigm as no invitation for the president’s State of the Union address has ever been rescinded.
In Heartfelt Speech, Del. Margaret Ransone Defends Women’s Achievement While Opposing ERA
In a heartfelt speech which has since racked up hundreds of thousands of views online, Delegate Margaret Ransone (R-Kinsale) spoke on her career, her accomplishments, and her service in the General Assembly following days of heated and uncivil debate over the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.
“I am a woman and I’m an elected member of the oldest legislative body in the New World, the Virginia House of Delegates,” opened Ransone. “Needless to say I’m very proud of that and I’m proud of how I got here.”
Ransone, in her eighth year as a delegate, helps manage her family’s oyster company, located in Kinsale, in Virginia’s Northern Neck.
Her voice breaking on occasion, Ransone rose to the floor on Tuesday following a heated committee hearing that morning in which she voted against ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, saying it would be duplicitous of existing protections in the US and Virginia constitutions while potentially opening the door to taxpayer funding of abortion by court order.
In that hearing, Ransone said, attendees covered the ears of their young daughters when she began to speak, depriving the young women in attendance of the opportunity to hear both sides of the debate.
Ransone said feeling silenced was a low point in her public service career.
“Do you know as soon as I started to speak, mothers in the room who simply disagreed with my position covered their daughters ears, as a sign to me and to their daughters that in the political process you don’t have to listen to people who mom disagrees with. And, to be honest, it was a low my public service career because when I simply wanted to empower young women that message delivered from a Republican woman simply wasn’t worth hearing.”
“Well, today, I will deliver that message again, to the young women and to their mothers and to daughters, and even to the twenty seven women in this body. Never, never let anyone tell you that you need anything more than hard work, determination, heart, and a strong work ethic to be successful in life,” Ransone continued.
Earlier that day, several measures making Virginia the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment failed in the House’s Privileges and Elections Subcommittee #1, which Ransone chairs, following earlier passage in the Senate. While the full Privileges and Elections committee could still report the resolutions, observers said the subcommittee recommendation was likely to be followed, resulting in the amendment’s failure this year.
The committee’s vote followed weeks of debate and rallies by supporters and opponents of the amendment, which grew increasingly heated as the session dragged on.
Ransone also dismissed suggestions that men had “bullied” her into voting a specific way.
“The men in this body, on both sides of the aisle, they respect me and they have become incredible friends to me, and I’ve earned their respect,” she continued, praising her colleagues. “They’ve embraced me, and they’ve embraced my opinions, and they believe in me. And that’s incredible.”
“They empower me to speak my mind just like I’m doing today.”
Responding forcefully, Ransone said her vote was hers alone, elaborating on why she felt the Equal Rights Amendment was not necessary.
“And as a strong independent woman it was my choice to vote against the ERA. Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. Women deserve equal treatment. Women deserve to be paid fairly. Women deserve to have every opportunity in life. Just like a man does.”
“And thanks to the 14th Amendment and the Virginia Constitution violating any one of those is against the law.”
Ransone also warned that ratification of the measure currently before the General Assembly could lead to years of court challenges, as the Congressionally-imposed deadline for ratification passed in 1982, one decade after the amendment was approved on Capitol Hill and sent to the states.
Previously, in the 1939 case Coleman v. Miller, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress did have the authority to set a deadline for ratification.
Writing a majority opinion in a case concerning Kansas’ vote to ratify a child labor amendment, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes stated such a limitation was a “question for the political departments, with the ultimate authority in the Congress in the exercise of its control over the promulgation of the adoption of the amendment.”
Continuing the message she shared earlier in committee, Ransone closed by encouraging young women to follow their dreams and let nothing stand in their way.
“Never let anyone tell you that you need to wait on any law to be successful,” she said. “Nothing stopped any of us with hard work and determination and a big heart nothing’s going to stop you either.”
In the end, Ransone had the last word — turning what had been an attempt to silence her voice into a speech which went viral on the Internet.
K-9 Officers Garner More Protections Against Abuse With GOP-Led Bill
As the Virginia State Senate is set to vote on legislation that would classify abusing a family pet a felony, they are setting their sights on providing the same measures against those who abuse or kill law enforcement animals.
Bill Repealing Suspension Of Driver’s Licenses For Unpaid Court Costs Heads To Senate Floor
The legislation from Senator Bill Stanley would repeal the requirement that the driver’s license of a person convicted of any violation of the law – who fails or refuses to provide for immediate payment of fines or costs – be suspended by the state’s judicial system.
On Subjective Emotion and Objective Truth
When meaning is found in subjective emotion instead of objective truth, it’s no wonder the frauds will create passion from the banal.
Political Redistricting Map Chosen By Federal Court Heavily Favors Democrats Ahead Of 2019 Election
At least six Republican delegates would be running in districts where a majority of voters chose President Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election.