“The York County School Division is aware of the video being circulated on social media depicting an interaction between a para-educator and a student…administrators are continuing to review this personnel matter,” a statement reads.
State Senator Frank Wagner Announces Retirement After 28 Years In Virginia Legislature
Becoming the third Republican State Senator to retire this year, Frank Wagner (R-Virginia Beach) has announced that he will not seek reelection in 2019. The Naval Academy graduate has served in the General Assembly’s upper chamber since 2002, being a staunch proponent of improving transportation infrastructure in Hampton Roads, supporting veterans care, and aiding in deregulatory measures to promote business growth.
“It has been one of the highest honors of my life to serve the citizens of the Commonwealth. I want to thank the citizens of Virginia Beach and Norfolk for giving me that privilege of serving them in Virginia legislature,” the 63-year-old said in a statement.
“Virginia is a great state, which is why we choose to live here. I just hope that I have left our state a little better off for me having served. However, the time has come to turn my seat over to the next generation to continue to make Virginia a better place for all of us to live and raise our families,” he added.
Wagner began his 28-year legislative career in the House of Delegates, serving as the 21st House District’s representative from 1992 to 2001. Apart from being a member of the State Senate for the past 17 years, Wagner ran unsuccessfully to become the Republican Party’s nominee for governor in 2017 with a campaign slogan of, “One veteran, one businessman, one Virginian, one choice.”
During the 2019 legislative session in Richmond, Wagner’s legislation regarding coal ash ponds was passed by the General Assembly. S.B. 1355 requires coal ash ponds to be closed by moving coal ash to lined landfills on site or recycled. According to the bill, approximately 27 million tons of coal ash across the Commonwealth will be secured in a safe manner.
S.B. 1746, which was also passed, directs the Department of Education to encourage school boards that have a significant number of enrolled military-connected students to partner with the National Math and Science Initiative to provide such students with the tools and resources necessary to advance science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning, job creation, and career readiness.
Wagner also helped lead the charge to ban people from holding a cell phone while driving a to mitigate distracted driving injuries and fatalities in the Commonwealth, but the bill failed to become law.
Senate Majority Leader Tommy Norment (R-James City) said of Wagner’s retirement, “Having worked closely with Frank for many years, he has become a great and close friend.”
“With nearly three decades serving the people of Virginia in the General Assembly, and his earlier service to our nation in the Navy, I know Frank will continue to find ways to contribute to Virginia, America, and, of course, Hampton Roads,” he added in a statement.
Senators Richard “Dick” Black (R-Loudoun) and Bill Carrico (R-Grayson) also announced their plans not to run for reelection this November. Currently, the GOP is holding onto a slim 21-19 majority in the upper chamber, with Democrats already eyeing the 7th State Senate District that encompasses Virginia Beach and parts of Norfolk.
VA Dems Executive Calls African-American Conservatives ‘Embarrassment To America’
“Dinesh D’Souza and the rest of that group are an embarrassment to America. We can’t wait for them to exit our Commonwealth,” said a Virginia Democratic Party spokesman as “Blexit” came to Richmond over the weekend.
Delegate Steve Landes Plans To Retire From House, Run For Circuit Court Clerk
After 12 terms in the Virginia House of Delegates, Steve Landes (R-Weyers Cave) has announced that he will not seek re-election this November. However, the senior Republican legislator is set to run for an open clerk of the court position in Augusta County as Carol Brydge announced she plans to retire April 1.
Landes’ decision comes as a surprise just as Republicans gear up to defend their slim majority this November as all 140 seats in the General Assembly are up for reelection. In the House, Republicans have a 51-49 majority, and a 21-19 majority in the State Senate.
As the 25th House District’s representative, which covers portions of Albemarle, Augusta, and Rockingham counties, Delegate Landes also served as chairman of the House Education Committee, vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, and vice chairman of the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC). Moreover, he was a member of the Rules and Privileges and Elections committees, the House Select Committee on School Safety, and the lower chamber’s member on the Governor’s Advisory Council on Revenue Estimates.
During his tenure in the statehouse in Richmond, which began in 1996, Landes focused on promoting economic development, fostering education innovations, and increasing healthcare choice, access, and affordability. According to his website, he was named the 2016 Legislator of the Year by both the Virginia Chamber of Commerce and the Virginia Retail Merchants Association and named the Partners for College Affordability and Public Trust’s “2018 Champion of Affordable College” for his work during last year’s legislative session.
During the 2019 session, Delegate Landes introduced H.B. 1729 as a part of the House Select Committee on School Safety’s 24-point priority recommendation list. The bill would require school counselors across the state to spend at least 80 percent of their time counseling students.
Another important piece of legislation from Landes this year, H.B. 1611, provides that the ratio of the assets to the obligations of the Virginia College Savings Plan shall not exceed 105 percent, given the plan is the most well-funded its been in its history. He said the bill “will have a significant impact on families being able to keep more money in their pockets and attend college at a lower cost” in a news release.
As of Monday, no one announced their intent to run for the Republican nomination for the soon-to-be vacant seat. The 25th District Legislative District Republican Committee voted in February to hold a party canvass for its candidate. The deadline to file with the committee is March 6 at 5:00 p.m.
Virginia Republicans Set Their Sights On Improving Healthcare In 2019 Legislative Session
From increasing coverage for those with autism, expanding telemedicine, and raising the minimum age to buy tobacco and alternative nicotine products, over a dozen bills from the GOP will assist in promoting better healthcare and healthcare coverage for Virginians.
Sex Trafficking Legislation Large Part Of GOP’s Pledge Keeping Communities Safe
Measures to mitigate human and sex trafficking were a large part of the Republican Party’s agenda in the 2019 legislative session in Richmond, which included other bills to enhance the criminal justice system.
Virginia Republicans Continue Progress On Statewide Adoption Reform
GOP lawmakers passed legislation during this year’s 46-day session to help reform adoption procedures in Virginia.
Pam Northam’s Cotton-Picking Catastrophe
Pam Northam, the wife of embattled Virginia Governor Ralph Northam (D) is now under fire after upsetting an eighth-grade African-American girl during a tour of the Executive Mansion as she was handed a piece of cotton by the First Lady, also asked to imagine being enslaved. The latest racial debacle comes almost one month after the governor reportedly appeared in a racist photo in his 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook – either dressed in blackface or wearing Ku Klux Klan robes and hood – but denied doing so.
Questions were also raised about another yearbook photo, this time while Northam was a cadet at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in the early 1980s, where his nickname of “Coonman,” a racial epithet, is placed below his head shot.
In the days following, Governor Northam walked back his admission of appearing in the first photo, which included an attempt to moonwalk in front of reporters in a crowded room, and his wife telling him “inappropriate circumstances.”
However, it seems the Commonwealth’s First Lady did not heed her own advice amid the loathsome beginning of the racial “reconciliation tour.” Last week, the first stop at Virginia Union University (VUU) had to be cancelled due to widespread student backlash and subsequent calls for him to step down from office.
Nevertheless, another instance of racial insensitivity has led to the governor’s scandal being spread to his wife.
“The Governor and Mrs. Northam have asked the residents of the Commonwealth to forgive them for their racially insensitive past actions,” wrote Leah Dozier Walker, who oversees the Office of Equity and Community Engagement at the Virginia Department of Education. “But the actions of Mrs. Northam, just last week, do not lead me to believe that this Governor’s office has taken seriously the harm and hurt they have caused African-Americans in Virginia or that they are deserving of our forgiveness,” she added in her February 25 letter to Virginia lawmakers and the office of the governor.
On February 21, the Northams hosted a gathering at the Executive Mansion in downtown Richmond of approximately 100 youths who had served as State Senate pages during this year’s legislative session. Pam Northam took groups of pages on a tour through the building – built in 1813 by slave labor and is the oldest active governor’s residence in country – and in the kitchen, she held up samples of cotton and tobacco to a group of about 20 children and described the enslaved workers who picked it.
“Mrs. Northam then asked these three pages (the only African-American pages in the program) if they could imagine what it must have been like to pick cotton all day,” Walker wrote. “I can not for the life of me understand why the First Lady would single out the African-American pages for this — or — why she would ask them such an insensitive question.”
The governor’s office said the First Lady handed the cotton to whomever was nearby, both African-American and Caucasian pages, and wanted everyone to note the “sharpness” of the cotton boll and imagine how uncomfortable it would have been to handle all day.
In a letter written by Walker’s daughter addressed to Pam Northam, the young girl said she did not take the cotton, but her friend did.
“It made her very uncomfortable,” the girl wrote. “I will give you the benefit of the doubt, because you gave it to some other pages.”
“But you followed this up by asking: ‘Can you imagine being an enslaved person, and having to pick this all day?’ which didn’t help the damage you had done,” the girl added in her letter to Pam Northam.
While the First Lady offered the cotton to all of the pages in attendance over multiple tours, the situation shows a gross negligence of understanding the environment surrounding Virginia’s executive branch over the entirety of February, which is also, quite ironically, Black History Month.
“I regret that I have upset anyone,” Pam Northam said in a statement from the governor’s spokeswoman, Ofirah Yheskel.
Although Governor Northam has committed to dedicating the remainder of his term in office, which ends January 2022, to “racial equity” and “healing,” the calls for his resignation are far-reaching. After the latest development, it seems that not much thought is being taken into account for whatever “healing” the governor and his family are attempting to promote.
Ed Gillespie Responds To Ralph Northam’s Racial Scandal
In the weeks since photos were released of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam (D) reportedly appearing in racist garb, nearly every elected official has responded to the situation – Virginia legislators, U.S. senators, and even 2020 presidential contenders. Though, the one who battled against Northam in the 2017 gubernatorial race, Ed Gillespie, has not responded, until now.
The former Republican candidate for governor was recently asked to give his take on the matter at the Heritage Foundation’s Jay A. Parker lecture and reception.
“For Virginians, this is a very painful time to see these images splashed up on television screens and newspapers, and it doesn’t reflect the Virginia that I know and my fellow Virginians [know],” Gillespie said as he started off his monologue.
“Virginia has a long history when it comes to race, obviously.”
“From our very founding, Virginia and Virginians have been at the very forefront of American history,” he said, meanwhile noting the Commonwealth has, in fact, been on the “wrong side” of that history many times.
Gillespie explained that Virginia was the home of “massive resistance,” a political a strategy enforced by Democratic U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr. to unite white leaders against public school desegregation. Nevertheless, he added that Virginia was also the nexus of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), cementing the notion “separate is not inherently equal.”
Referencing Farmville’s Russa Moton High School, Gillespie explained that “more students who were plaintiffs in Brown v. Board were Virginians than from any other state.”
Adding his reverence for the school, which is now a museum commemorating the student birthplace of the American civil rights movement, he said of his experience, “when Barbara Johns led that walk-out, you feel like you’re there.”
“Cappahosic is the cradle of Virginia civil rights and really of American civil rights,” he explained, adding the “Gloucester Institute does a fantastic job on that beautiful piece of property where Dr. [Martin Luther] King [Jr.] stayed before the ‘March on Washington.’ [We’re] proud of that history in Virginia.”
According to the Gloucester Institute, the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) was first conceived at that location, which led to Dr. Frederick Patterson, the son-in-law of Dr. Robert Russa Moton, becoming the first UNCF President. Furthermore, strategies were conceived at Holly Knoll at Cappahosic for the desegregation of lunch counters, and “[o]n a bench under the 400-year-old live oak, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is said to have drafted portions of the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.”
Gillespie also said he and Virginians are proud to celebrate “the 30th anniversary of the first inauguration of an elected black governor in the history of the United States of America.” Governor L. Douglas “Doug” Wilder served as the 66th governor of the Commonwealth, also going on to become the first directly-elected mayor of Richmond from 2005 to 2009.
Continuing his response, the former GOP gubernatorial candidate said, “while we’re seeing some imagery right now that does not reflect well on some of the leadership in Virginia, we have much to be proud of, [but] we have a long way to go.”
“One of the things that we’re seeing in American society right now is a sorting that’s going on, and it’s not just in the media…we’re living with people whom we agree and not around people with whom we disagree – there is a real sorting on and that’s a problem.”
He explained that when he ran for office he would “go places I otherwise would not go, and to meet people I otherwise would not meet, and that was enlightening to me, and to try and look at things through other people’s eyes.”
Gillespie then told an anecdotal tale about the “Black Lives Matter” movement, which has led the renewed charge for race relations over the past few years.
“I remember the first time I saw that, and my initial, immediate reaction was similar I suspect to a lot of people, which was ‘well of course black lives matter, all lives matter.’ But then I stopped and thought, ‘I have never once in my life felt the need to stand up and shout white lives matter,'” he said.
“When you hear a significant portion of your fellow Americans feeling compelled to call this to your attention you need to stop and listen, and it affected my thinking in terms of criminal justice reform and a number of other things.”
Throughout his campaign for governor, Gillespie had conversations with incarcerated individuals and victims of crimes to bridge the gap between racial disparities in the criminal justice system and socioeconomic factors that hold back some Virginians. Moreover, he commonly told voters the criminal justice system should be “just, fair and redeeming,” with Virginians exiting the system “more prepared to live a full and contributing life in society.”
Ending his response during the Heritage Foundation’s lecture, Gillespie said, “This is a rough time in Virginia, it is not reflective of the values and the people of Virginia, and we’ve had tough times before and we’ve gotten through it and I’m confident we will get through it now.”
Virginia Senators Tim Kaine, Mark Warner Join Democrats Turning Blind Eye To Infanticide
The vote on the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act compelled lawmakers to defend the indefensible, put names to those disregarding life, revealed the sanctimonious nature of the Democratic Party, and codified the consistent logical and philosophical irregularities of the dehumanization and political categorization that governs the liberal point of view.