#virginia house of delegates

[libraryofva]

Recent Acquisition - Ephemera Collection

Complimentary Supper to Major Oscar M. Crutchfield, Speaker of the House of Delegates, given by the Members and Officers of the House, at the Exchange Hotel, Richmond, March 10th, 1856.

[tomorrowusa]

Abortion is the major issue in Virginia's state legislative elections on Tuesday.

Republicans control the governor's office and the House of Delegates – the lower chamber of the Virginia legislature. Democrats hold a narrow majority in the Senate – the upper chamber.

Virginia is the only state in the South which observes full reproductive freedom. GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin (AKA: Glenn Trumpkin) is pushing a measure to restrict abortion. Trumpkin has national ambitions and wants to re-enforce his hardline credentials by pandering to the MAGA crowd.

If Democrats do not end up with control of at least one chamber of the legislature after Tuesday's election then Virginia will join the rest of the South as a place where Republican officials have a virtual regulator in every OBGYN office in the state.

Legislative elections can be decided by very narrow margins. And the tightest race for the Virginia Senate seems to be the 24th Senate District where incumbent Democrat Monty Mason is fighting a challenge by Republican J.D. Diggs. In a Washington Post article about the race in the 24th district, Karen Tumulty reports...

Across Virginia, abortion has become the overriding issue on the airwaves for the Democrats, highlighted in more than 40 percent of their ads. Republicans are talking about it in only 3 percent of theirs, according to the tracking firm AdImpact. But Mason noted: “People bring it up to me. I don’t have to lead with it in a lot of places.” That is because Virginia is the last Southern state where the procedure has remained widely available after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Abortion in Virginia is legal up to 26 weeks of gestation.

A vote in the Virginia legislative election is important anywhere in the state. But it's even more important in these swing districts.

^^^ those charts come from this excellent article at the UVA Center for Politics.

The Race for Virginia’s Legislature, Part Two

If you'd like to know which legislative districts you're in, in Virginia or ANY state, find out here.

Find Your Legislators Look your legislators up by address or use your current location.

There's statistical evidence that Virginia voters in the 18 to 29 group can swing an election.

In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden easily carried Virginia in the presidential election; voters 18 to 29 overall made up 14.6% of the Virginians who took part in that election. In 2021, Republican Glenn Youngkin/Trumpkin won the race for Virginia governor; 18 to 29 voters were just 9.1% of the Virginia voters in that election. (source)

VOTE! If you live outside Virginia but know people there, send them a quick message to remind them to vote.

There's no such thing as an unimportant election.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

A battle over LGBTQ+ books in a Virginia county may cost teenagers their right to visit the public library.

The chair of the Board of Supervisors in rural Botetourt County has decided the best way to ensure “parental rights” in the tiny rural area, pop. 34,000, is to send parents to the library with their kids.

Acting on a campaign pledge made in June before a primary election, board chair Donald “Mac” Scothorn (R) announced a proposal at the board’s July 31 meeting to prohibit anyone under 18 from visiting the county library without adult supervision.

It’s the board chair’s solution to a long-simmering dispute over LGBTQ+ content in the county’s four public libraries, pitting Botetourt County residents associated with groups like Moms for Liberty against free speech advocates.

The “parents’ rights” activists have pursued their book-banning agenda at school board meetings, filing removal request forms at the libraries and publicizing what they believe is inappropriate content for minors on a website likely available to minors.

For their part, the Board of Supervisors has issued two resolutions declaring “unwavering” support for the library system and staff, including one issued at the same meeting where Scothorn announced his proposal.

Scothorn’s idea came as a surprise to Marlene Preston, chair of the Botetourt County Library Board of Trustees, which has the ultimate say over library policy.

“The Library Board hasn’t endorsed or even discussed any changes to our policies regarding teens in the library,” Preston told Cardinal News. “For now, we’re pleased that the Board of Supervisors has formally supported the library and its staff.”

County Supervisor Steve Clinton, who also serves on the library board, agreed a change to the libraries’ supervision policy is not on the agenda, and called Scothorn’s recommendation a “news flash” he’s not in favor of. The Library Board’s next meeting is scheduled for Aug. 16.

Current policy in Botetourt County libraries requires children 13 and under to be supervised by adults, which has more to do with behavioral considerations than what kids may be reading, according to library director Julie Phillips.

She’s concerned how teenagers would interact with the public library under more restrictive parental guidance rules. Programming for teenagers at the four libraries includes a chess club and special programs like improv theater classes.

Attendance policies for minors vary by jurisdiction around the state. In Franklin County, children 10 and younger require supervision by an adult or another child 14 or older. In Rockbridge County, children under 8 must be accompanied by an adult 18 or older.

Until August 2020, the unattended child policy in Botetourt County was even less restrictive, reading, “Children under the age of seven, or who have emotional or social difficulty, must be attended by a parent or other responsible caregiver at all times.”

Scothorn’s campaign promise, published with another supervisorial candidate in a local county newspaper, read in part: “We pledge to bring before the Board of Supervisors of Botetourt County a proposal to raise the age of required parental consent for access to graphic sexually explicit materials to the age of 18.”

Doing so would “ultimately give the decision on access to such materials to the parents, where we believe that decision belongs,” the statement read.

Scothorn and Miller wrote they based their idea on H.B. 1379, passed by the Virginia House of Delegates early in 2023, which would have allowed parents to restrict their children’s access to any item in a school library catalog that was considered to have “graphic sexual content.”

While that bill failed to pass the state senate and didn’t make it into law, the pair wrote, “We believe its intent can inform local library policy considerations.”

[filosofablogger]

A Unanimous Vote -- A Rarity Indeed!

Can you even begin to imagine our legislature voting unanimously on anything?  State legislatures are typically no better, there is conflict and differences of opinion almost wherever one goes these days.  But something unique and inspiring happened in Virginia’s House of Delegates this week, and our friend Annie is here to tell us about it! In a Country Not Yet Reconciled With Its Past,…

[robpegoraro]

Progress in Virginia still demands some patience

Decades of practice as a Virginia voter have tempered my expectations of progress in any one General Assembly session. And yet...

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…

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Robert Reich's Substack:

Friends, For years, conservatives have railed against what they call the “administrative state” and denounced regulations. But let’s be clear. When they speak of the “administrative state,” they’re talking about agencies tasked with protecting the public from corporations that seek profits at the expense of the health, safety, and pocketbooks of average Americans. Regulations are the means by which agencies translate broad legal mandates into practical guardrails. Substitute the word “protection” for “regulation” and you get a more accurate picture of who has benefited — consumers, workers, and average people needing clean air and clean water. Substitute “corporate legal movement” for the “conservative legal movement” and you see who’s really mobilizing, and for what purpose.

**

[...] Last week, the Supreme Court made it much harder for the FTC, the Labor Department, and dozens of other agencies — ranging from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Food and Drug Administration, Securities and Exchange Commission, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and National Highway and Safety Administration — to protect Americans from corporate misconduct.

On Thursday, the six Republican-appointed justices eliminated the ability of these agencies to enforce their rules through in-house tribunals, rather than go through the far more costly and laborious process of suing corporations in federal courts before juries. On Friday, the justices overturned a 40-year-old precedent requiring courts to defer to the expertise of these agencies in interpreting the law, thereby opening the agencies to countless corporate lawsuits alleging that Congress did not authorize the agencies to go after specific corporate wrongdoing. In recent years, the court’s majority has also made it easier for corporations to sue agencies and get public protections overturned. The so-called “major questions doctrine” holds that judges should nullify regulations that have a significant impact on corporate profits if Congress was not sufficiently clear in authorizing them.

[...] In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, then a modest business group in Washington, D.C., asked Lewis Powell, then an attorney in Richmond, Virginia, to recommend actions corporations should take in response to the rising tide of public protections (that is, regulations). Powell’s memo — distributed widely to Chamber members — said corporations were “under broad attack” from consumer, labor, and environmental groups. In reality, these groups were doing nothing more than enforcing the implicit social contract that had emerged at the end of World War II, ensuring that corporations be responsive to all their stakeholders — not just shareholders but also their workers, consumers, and the environment.

[...] The so-called “conservative legal movement” of young lawyers who came of age working for Ronald Reagan — including Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — were in reality part of this corporate legal movement. And they still are. Trump’s three appointments to the Supreme Court emerged from the same corporate legal movement. The next victory of the corporate legal movement will occur if and when the Supreme Court accepts a broad interpretation of the so-called “non-delegation doctrine.” Under this theory of the Constitution, the courts should not uphold any regulation in which Congress has delegated its lawmaking authority to agencies charged with protecting the public. If accepted by the court, this would mark the end of all regulations — that is, all public protections not expressly contained in statutes — and the final triumph of Lewis Powell’s vision.

Robert Reich wrote an interesting Substack piece on the history of the right-wing war on regulatory power that began with the infamous Powell Memo by Lewis Powell, and culminated with the recent Loper Bright Enterprises, Jarkesy, and Trump rulings.

[batboyblog]

West Virginia Republicans passed a bill that would allow librarians to be prosecuted if kids see books people find objectionable.... this is the future Republicans want nation wide, vote to stop them this November if you like freedom.

[freshwolfhell]

Franklin

Strictly speaking, Richard, while Virginia's views on independence are well-known, your legislature in Williamsburg has never formally authorized your delegation here in Congress to support the cause. Of course, if we could think of a Virginian with enough influence to go down there and persuade the House of Burgesses--

Lee

My name is Richard Henry Lee, Virginia is my home!

And may my horses turn to glue if I can't deliver unto you

A resolution, on independency!

[reality-detective]

BREAKING: Candidate in high-stakes Virginia election performed sex acts with husband in live videos

This is Susanna Gibson, who is running for a seat in the narrowly divided Virginia statehouse. As recently as last year she was posting as “HotWifeExperience” on the website Chaturbate, where men could pay tokens to get her to perform specific sex acts.

By the way, she has two young children.

[tomorrowusa]

It has been a bad week for Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia. Youngkin (AKA: Glenn Trumpkin) has been trying to position himself as the savior of the Republican Party in order to gain national political traction.

Trumpkin's centerpiece of Republican salvation has been what I call Faux Roe. It's his proposal to restrict abortion to the first 15 weeks and offer almost no exceptions thereafter. His plan was to flip the Virginia Senate and enact Faux Roe into law. He had tried to portray the real Roe v. Wade and Democratic support for it as "extremist".

Not only did Trumpkin fail to flip the state Senate, but Republicans also lost control of the Virginia House of Delegates. Trumpkin will now have to face a legislature with BOTH chambers under Democratic control for the last two years of his term.

Democrats have secured full control of the Virginia state legislature, winning a majority in the house of delegates and depriving the Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, of the opportunity to enact a 15-week abortion ban. Democrats maintained their majority in the state senate and flipped control of the house of delegates, where Republicans previously held a narrow advantage. Democrats’ victories quashed Youngkin’s hopes of securing a Republican-controlled legislature that would be able to advance his policy agenda, casting doubt upon his prospects as a potential presidential candidate. “Governor Youngkin and Virginia Republicans did everything they could to take total control of state government, but the people of the Commonwealth rejected them,” Susan Swecker, chair of the Democratic party of Virginia, said in a statement. “Virginians won’t go backwards. Instead of extremism and culture wars, people voted for commonsense leadership and problem solvers.”

Virginia's off-off year elections take place in odd years prior to Congressional and presidential elections. They provide some insight as to the direction of the prevailing political winds.

As one of the only states holding off-year elections, the Virginia results could serve as a bellwether for the presidential race next year.

Things haven't been going well for radical anti-abortion, anti-democracy Republicans in general.

The Democratic victory in Virginia was good news for President Biden.

Why Democrats’ big Virginia win is also a victory for Biden

Joe Biden wasn’t on the ballot on Tuesday in Virginia. But Democrats’ big win will bring welcome news on the other side of the Potomac. Virginia’s off-year elections have long been seen as a bellwether of the broader political environment — and a partial referendum on the incumbent president. So Democrats sweeping control of the state legislature — which both parties believed was in play — will serve as a boost to Biden’s reelection campaign next year. [ ... ] Tuesday’s wins will likely validate Democrats’ plans to continue to run on abortion next year, a strategy that has given them a series of almost uninterrupted wins since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer. “In hundreds of races since Donald Trump’s conservative Supreme Court appointments overturned Roe v. Wade, we’ve seen Americans overwhelmingly side with President Biden and Democrats’ vision for this country,” Biden’s campaign manager Julie Chávez Rodríguez said in a statement Tuesday night. “That same choice will be before voters again next November, and we are confident the American people will send President Biden and Vice President Harris back to the White House to keep working for them.” They also show that Youngkin doesn’t have the silver bullet for solving the GOP’s electoral problems with abortion, as his operation had hoped.

Republicans had been trying for 49 years to get Roe v. Wade overturned. When the GOP Supreme Court finally did the deed last year, it turned out to be a poison pill for Republicans running for office.

In Virginia, Democrats won 21 of 40 seats in the Senate and 51 of 100 seats in the House of Delegates.

When the official counting of late absentee ballots and provisional ballots is completed next week, Dems could end up gaining one additional seat in each chamber. 🎉

[expfcultragreen]

The sourcelink is also dead now but its archived:

And she's got a wiki page:

[sordidamok]

Gov. Glenn Youngkin could still veto. The fact that it got this far is pretty amazing.

[theworstfoundingfathers]

THE GRAND FINALE WHO IS THE TRULY THE WORST FOUNDING FATHER?

THOMAS JEFFERSON VS HENRY LAURENS

Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, and philosopher who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. Following the American Revolutionary War and prior to becoming the nation’s third president in 1801, Jefferson was the first United States secretary of state under George Washington and the nation’s second vice president under John Adams.

Starting in 1803, he promoted a western expansionist policy with the Louisiana Purchase and began the process of Indian tribal removal from the newly acquired territory.

Jefferson lived in a planter economy largely dependent upon slavery, and used slave labor for his household, plantation, and workshops. Over his lifetime he owned about 600 slaves.

During his presidency, Jefferson allowed the diffusion of slavery into the Louisiana Territory hoping to prevent slave uprisings in Virginia and to prevent South Carolina secession. In 1804, in a compromise on the slavery issue, Jefferson and Congress banned domestic slave trafficking for one year into the Louisiana Territory.

In 1819, Jefferson strongly opposed a Missouri statehood application amendment that banned domestic slave importation and freed slaves at the age of 25 on grounds it would destroy the union.

Jefferson never freed most of his slaves, and he remained silent on the issue while he was president.

Since the 1790s, Jefferson was rumored to have had children by his sister-in-law and slave Sally Hemings, known as the Jefferson-Hemings controversy. According to scholarly consensus…as well as oral history, Jefferson probably fathered at least six children with Hemings.

---

Henry Laurens (March 6, 1724 [O.S. February 24, 1723] – December 8, 1792) was an American Founding Father, merchant, slave trader, and rice planter from South Carolina who became a political leader during the Revolutionary War. A delegate to the Second Continental Congress, Laurens succeeded John Hancock as its president. He was a signatory to the Articles of Confederation and, as president, presided over its passage.

Laurens had earned great wealth as a partner in the largest slave-trading house in North America, Austin and Laurens. In the 1750s alone, this Charleston firm oversaw the sale of more than 8,000 enslaved Africans.

Laurens’ oldest son, Colonel John Laurens, was killed in 1782 in the Battle of the Combahee River, as one of the last casualties of the Revolutionary War. He had supported enlisting and freeing slaves for the war effort and suggested to his father that he begin with the 40 he stood to inherit. He had urged his father to free the family’s slaves, but although conflicted, Henry Laurens never manumitted his 260 slaves.

---

By popular vote, this final round will run for one full week

Please reblog so we can get the biggest sample size possible and figure who is TRULY the worst

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Gustaf Kilander at The Independent:

Some Republicans are openly having second thoughts about former President Donald Trump’s choice of running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance. The senator has received negative attention after old clips resurfaced of him calling some Democrats, including Vice President and presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, “childless cat ladies” and arguing that people with children should have more influence over the future of the country than those without children. The vice president has two stepchildren.

Harris, who would be the first Black South Asian woman president, has broken numerous fundraising records and she has secured enough delegates to claim the nomination at the Democratic National Convention next month. Ben Shapiro, a conservative commentator, recently said on his show, “If you had a time machine, if you go back two weeks, would [Trump] have picked JD Vance again? I doubt it.” “I think he probably would have picked someone like [Governor] Glenn Youngkin from Virginia in an attempt to broaden out his base,” he added. “There was clearly zero vetting of JD Vance. Clearly a vibes pick by an overconfident Trump that is proving to be a disaster,” former Trump White House Communications Director Alyssa Farah Griffin wrote on X after The New York Times revealed that Vance wrote “I hate the police” in an email after the killing of 18-year-old Black man Michael Brown by a white officer in October 2014.

“Given the number of negative experiences I’ve had in the past few years, I can’t imagine what a Black guy goes through,” he added at the time. Wisconsin Republican strategist Bill McCosten told Politico that “Of the people that were mentioned as finalists, he had the most risk, because he had never been vetted nationally.” He added, “Doug Burgum ran for president, he had been vetted, mostly. Marco Rubio has run for president, he had been vetted. JD Vance hadn’t. So there was risk in the pick. And we’re going to see over the next 102 days how he stands up to the bright lights of a national campaign.” A member of the House Republican caucus anonymously told the outlet: “Find me one publicly elected official in the Senate who is pushing JD Vance other than [Utah Republican Senator] Mike Lee. I’ll wait.”

Is Donald Trump beginning to regret his pick of J.D. Vance for VP yet?

Vance has been nothing but a liability to the ticket, and if Trump loses, picking Vance instead of Doug Burgum, Marco Rubio, or Glenn Youngkin may well cost him a victory.

Trump wanted Burgum, but his two sons Eric and Donald Jr. wanted Vance instead, and the sons won out.

[nando161mando]

Today in Labor History November 30, 1930: Mother Jones died, age 100, in Silver Spring, Maryland. She was an organizer or "walking delegate" for the United Mine Workers (UMW), famous for her bravado. When she and 3,000 women were released by a militia after being held all night in McAdoo, Pennsylvania, they marched straight to the hotel housing the soldiers and ate their breakfast. Even well into her 90s, she still roamed through the hills of West Virginia, encouraging miners to organize.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #MotherJones #union #strike #solidarity #FreeSpeech #prison #coal #mining #WestVirginia