#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.

[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.

[whencyclopedia]

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was an American lawyer, statesman, philosopher, and a Founding Father of the United States. A prominent figure of the American Revolution, he wrote the Declaration of Independence and later served as the first secretary of state, the second vice president, and the third president of the United States (served 1801-1809).

Early Life

Thomas Jefferson was born on 13 April 1743 at Shadwell Plantation in Albemarle County, Virginia. He was the third of ten children born to Peter Jefferson, a wealthy planter and land surveyor, and Jane Randolph Jefferson, a daughter of one of Virginia's most influential families. When Peter Jefferson died in 1757, 14-year-old Thomas inherited 5,000 acres of land as well as 60 enslaved people. From 1758 to 1760, he was privately tutored by Reverend James Maury before going on to the colonial capital of Williamsburg to attend the College of William & Mary. In his first year at college, he spent lavishly on parties, horses, and clothing, but he would soon regret this "showy style of living" (Boles, 18). His second year, therefore, was much more studious; he would apparently spend 15 hours a day at his studies, pausing only to exercise or to practice his violin.

The studious Jefferson soon became the protégé of mathematics professor William Small, who he would fondly remember as "the first truly enlightened or scientific man" he had ever met (Boles, 17). Small introduced Jefferson to the two other great intellectuals in Williamsburg – law professor George Wythe and Lt. Governor Francis Fauquier – and, at their weekly dinner parties, the four men would discuss politics and philosophy, greatly influencing the young Jefferson's political and intellectual development.

After completing his formal studies in 1762, Jefferson remained in Williamsburg to study law under Wythe and was admitted to the Virginia bar five years later in 1767. In 1768, he was elected to the House of Burgesses, representing Albemarle County. That same year, he began construction of a new home atop an 868-foot-high (265 m) mountain that overlooked his plantation. Called Monticello – Italian for "little mountain" – the house became the passion of Jefferson's life, and he would spend the next several decades designing and renovating it. The actual labor, of course, was mostly performed by his slaves; over the course of his lifetime, Jefferson owned approximately 600 enslaved people, most of whom were born into slavery on his property.

In 1772, after several failed romantic pursuits, Jefferson was finally married to the beautiful young widow Martha Wayles Skelton. Five years his junior, Martha shared his passions for literature and music; indeed, they often played music together – she on the harpsichord, he on the violin. The couple would have six children, only two of whom – Martha 'Patsy' (1772-1836) and Mary 'Polly' (1778-1804) – would survive to adulthood. When Jefferson's father-in-law died in 1773, he and Martha inherited 11,000 acres of land and 135 more enslaved people. By then, Jefferson had become involved with Virginia's struggle against Great Britain. Parliament's attempts to tax the colonists without their consent were vehemently opposed by the American Patriots, who saw such taxes as violations of their 'rights as Englishmen'. In 1774, Jefferson argued as much in his A Summary View of the Rights of British America. In it, he asserted that the colonies had the right to govern themselves, that they were tied to the English king only through voluntary bonds and that Parliament had no right to interfere in their affairs. This work earned him recognition as a Patriot leader in Virginia and led to his appointment as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia in the spring of 1775.

Writing the Declaration of Independence

Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (Public Domain)

Continue reading...

[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:

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Today in North Carolina!

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 20, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Sep 21, 2024

On September 16, CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten wrote that while it’s “[p]retty clear that [Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala] Harris is ahead nationally right now… [h]er advantage in the battlegrounds is basically nil. Average it all, Harris’[s] chance of winning the popular vote is 70%. Her chance of winning the electoral college is 50%.” Two days later, on September 18, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) skipped votes in the Senate to travel to Nebraska, where he tried to convince state legislators to switch the state’s system of allotting electoral votes by district to a winner-take-all system. That effort so far appears unsuccessful. 

In a country of 50 states and Washington, D.C.—a country of more than 330 million people—presidential elections are decided in just a handful of states, and it is possible for someone who loses the popular vote to become president. We got to this place thanks to the Electoral College, and to two major changes made to it since the ratification of the Constitution. 

The men who debated how to elect a president in 1787 worried terribly about making sure there were hedges around the strong executive they were creating so that he could not become a king. 

Some of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention wanted Congress to choose the president, but this horrified others who believed that a leader and Congress would collude to take over the government permanently. Others liked the idea of direct election of the president, but this worried delegates from smaller states, who thought that big states would simply be able to name their own favorite sons. It also worried those who pointed out that most voters would have no idea which were the leading men in other states, leaving a national institution, like the organization of Revolutionary War officers called the Society of the Cincinnati, the power to get its members to support their own leader, thus finding a different way to create a dictator. 

Ultimately, the framers came up with the election of a president by a group of men well known in their states but not currently office-holders, who would meet somewhere other than the seat of government and would disband as soon as the election was over. Each elector in this so-called Electoral College would cast two votes for president. The man with the most votes would be president, and the man with the second number of votes would be vice president (a system that the Twelfth Amendment ended in 1804). The number of electors would be equal to the number of senators and representatives allotted to each state in Congress. If no candidate earned a majority, the House of Representatives would choose the president, with each state delegation casting a single vote.

In the first two presidential elections—in 1788–1789 and 1792—none of this mattered very much, since the electors cast their ballots unanimously for George Washington. But when Washington stepped down, leaders of the newly formed political parties contended for the presidency. In the election of 1796, Federalist John Adams won, but Thomas Jefferson, who led the Democratic-Republicans (which were not the same as today’s Democrats or Republicans) was keenly aware that had Virginia given him all its electoral votes, rather than splitting them between him and Adams, he would have been president. 

On January 12, 1800, Jefferson wrote to the governor of Virginia, James Monroe, urging him to back a winner-take-all system that awarded all Virginia’s electoral votes to the person who won the majority of the vote in the state. He admitted that dividing electoral votes by district “would be more likely to be an exact representation of [voters’] diversified sentiments” but, defending his belief that he was the true popular choice in the country in 1796, said voting by districts “would give a result very different from what would be the sentiment of the whole people of the US. were they assembled together.” 

Virginia made the switch. Alarmed, the Federalists in Massachusetts followed suit to make sure Adams got all their votes, and by 1836, every state but South Carolina, where the legislature continued to choose electors until 1860, had switched to winner-take-all. 

This change horrified the so-called Father of the Constitution, James Madison, who worried that the new system would divide the nation geographically and encourage sectional tensions. He wrote in 1823 that voting by district, rather than winner-take-all, “was mostly, if not exclusively in view when the Constitution was framed and adopted.” He proposed a constitutional amendment to end winner-take-all.

But almost immediately, the Electoral College caused a different crisis. In 1824, electors split their votes among four candidates—Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay and William Crawford—and none won a majority in the Electoral College. Although Jackson won the most popular votes and the most electoral votes, when the election went to the House, the state delegations chose Adams, the son of former president John Adams.

Furious Jackson supporters thought a developing elite had stolen the election, and after they elected Jackson outright in 1828, the new president on December 8, 1829, implored Congress to amend the Constitution to elect presidents by popular vote. “To the people belongs the right of electing their Chief Magistrate,” he wrote; “it was never designed that their choice should in any case be defeated, either by the intervention of electoral colleges or…the House of Representatives.” 

Jackson warned that an election in the House could be corrupted by money or power or ignorance. He also warned that “under the present mode of election a minority may…elect a President,” and such a president could not claim legitimacy. He urged Congress “to amend our system that the office of Chief Magistrate may not be conferred upon any citizen but in pursuance of a fair expression of the will of the majority.”

But by the 1830s, the population of the North was exploding while the South’s was falling behind. The Constitution counted enslaved Americans as three fifths of a person for the purposes of representation, and direct election of the president would erase that advantage slave states had in the Electoral College. Their leaders were not about to throw that advantage away.

In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery (except as punishment for a crime) and scratched out the three-fifths clause, meaning that after the 1870 census the southern states would have more power in the Electoral College than they did before the war. In 1876, Republicans lost the popular vote by about 250,000 votes out of 8.3 million cast, but kept control of the White House through the Electoral College. As Jackson had warned, furious Democrats threatened rebellion. They never considered Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, whom they called “Rutherfraud,” a legitimate president. 

In 1888 it happened again. Incumbent Democratic president Grover Cleveland won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes out of 11 million cast, but Republican candidate Benjamin Harrison took the White House thanks to the 36 electoral votes from New York, a state Harrison won by fewer than 15,000 votes out of more than 1.3 million cast. Once in office, he and his team set out to skew the Electoral College permanently in their favor. Over twelve months in 1889–1890, they added six new, sparsely populated states to the Union, splitting the territory of Dakota in two and adding North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming while cutting out New Mexico and Arizona, whose inhabitants they expected would vote for Democrats.

The twentieth century brought another wrench to the Electoral College. The growth of cities, made possible thanks to modern industry—including the steel that supported skyscrapers—and transportation and sanitation, created increasing population differences among the different states.

The Constitution’s framers worried that individual states might try to grab too much power in the House by creating dozens and dozens of congressional districts, so they specified that a district could not be smaller than 30,000 people. But they put no upper limit on district sizes. After the 1920 census revealed that urban Americans outnumbered rural Americans, the House in 1929 capped its numbers at 435 to keep power away from those urban dwellers, including immigrants, that lawmakers considered dangerous, thus skewing the Electoral College in favor of rural America. Today the average congressional district includes 761,169 individuals—more than the entire population of Wyoming, Vermont, or Alaska—which weakens the power of larger states.  

In the twenty-first century the earlier problems with the Electoral College have grown until they threaten to establish permanent minority rule. A Republican president hasn’t won the popular vote since voters reelected George W. Bush in 2004, when his popularity was high in the midst of a war. The last Republican who won the popular vote in a normal election cycle was Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, in 1988, 36 years and nine cycles ago. And yet, Republicans who lost the popular vote won in the Electoral College in 2000—George W. Bush over Democrat Al Gore, who won the popular vote by about a half a million votes—and in 2016, when Democrat Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by about 3 million votes but lost in the Electoral College to Donald Trump. 

In our history, four presidents—all Republicans—have lost the popular vote and won the White House through the Electoral College. Trump’s 2024 campaign strategy appears to be to do it again (or to create such chaos that the election goes to the House of Representatives, where there will likely be more Republican-dominated delegations than Democratic ones).

In the 2024 election, Trump has shown little interest in courting voters. Instead, the campaign has thrown its efforts into legal challenges to voting and, apparently, into eking out a win in the Electoral College. The number of electoral votes equals the number of senators and representatives to which each state is entitled (100 + 435) plus three electoral votes for Washington, D.C., for a total of 538. A winning candidate must get a majority of those votes: 270.

Winner-take-all means that presidential elections are won in so-called swing or battleground states. Those are states with election margins of less than 3 points, so close they could be won by either party. The patterns of 2020 suggest that the states most likely to be in contention in 2024 are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, although the Harris-Walz campaign has opened up the map, suggesting its internal numbers show that states like Florida might also be in contention. Candidates and their political action committees focus on those few swing states—touring, giving speeches and rallies, and pouring money into advertising and ground operations. 

But in 2024 there is a new wrinkle. The Constitution’s framers agreed on a census every ten years so that representation in Congress could be reapportioned according to demographic changes. As usual, the 2020 census shifted representation, and so the pathway to 270 electoral votes shifted slightly. Those shifts mean that it is possible the election will come down to one electoral vote. Awarding Trump the one electoral vote Nebraska is expected to deliver to Harris could be enough to keep her from becoming president.

Rather than trying to win a majority of voters, just 49 days before the presidential election, Trump supporters—including Senator Graham—are making a desperate effort to use the Electoral College to keep Harris from reaching the requisite 270 electoral votes to win. It is unusual for a senator from one state to interfere in the election processes in another state, but Graham similarly pressured officials in Georgia to swing the vote there toward Trump in 2020.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[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