Category: General Assembly
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Neither House nor Senate Budget Raises General Taxes
But the Senate Strips the Data Center Tax Break Next Year by Steve Haner The Senate and House of Delegates financial committees met on Sunday to approve competing sets of amendments to the next Virginia budget, neither proposing any general tax increases. The Senate version included modest tax reform: a small taxpayer rebate for this…
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The Death of Fair Representation
Every partisan-drawn map is an insult, but Virginia’s is the most insulting. by Derrick A. Max There is a difference between redistricting and rigging. One is a constitutional necessity. The other is political temptation. Right now, Virginia stands at the crossroads between the two. On April 21st the voters will decide which way we turn. Using current…
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Will Virginia Criminalize Opposition to Islam?
by Daniel Greenfield Senator Saddam Azlan Salim, D-Faircax, claims that Virginia is in the middle of an ‘Islamophobia’ crisis. The second Muslim selected for the state senate, after Ghazala Hashmi who is now Virginia’s Lt. Governor, the Bangladeshi immigrant, from a country where non-Muslims are being murdered in the streets, has made complaining about “Islamophobia”…
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Radical Progressive Bills Advance in General Assembly
Car tax relief dies as radical Democrat legislation moves forward. by Victoria Manning Car tax relief was a central issue in the 2025 Virginia gubernatorial race. Both candidates publicly supported ending the car tax. Yet now that she’s governor, Abigail Spanberger has failed to deliver. Meanwhile, Democrats are pushing legislation to raise taxes and impose radical social…
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SCC Rejects Effort to Reverse Its Gas Plant Approval
by Steve Haner The Virginia State Corporation Commission has rejected a petition for reconsideration pushed by opponents of Dominion Energy’s planned Chesterfield natural gas generators. The environmental activist groups could now appeal the SCC’s approval of the plant to the Virginia Supreme Court. The SCC is a court, after all, so its decisions can be…
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Big Batteries Lose Big Energy Every Charging Cycle
by Steve Haner An inconvenient truth of utility-scale battery operations is that they take in more power than they later put out. From an energy grid operations point of view they are considered “net load” and certainly not a generation asset. In a previous post about the battery mandate legislation now poised for passage in…
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Mandated Public-Sector Unions Will Drive Up Property Taxes
by the Liberty Unyielding staff In Virginia, the Democratic state legislature is likely to adopt legislation that requires local governments to engage in collective bargaining with public-employee unions. If the local government and the union can’t agree on a big wage hike, an arbitrator will still be able to order the big wage hike if the arbitrator…
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Gutting Two Constitutions To Rig Future Elections
by Derrick A. Max In a dizzying display of power, the Democrats in the General Assembly voted this week to assign Virginia’s electoral college votes to the Presidential candidate who wins voter-dense urban and suburban areas in other states nationwide. They also voted to approve a gerrymandered congressional map that will give progressive and populous…
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Several Senate GOP Bills Seek to Amend or Repeal Clean Economy Act
By Steve Haner, Several legislative attempts to either repeal outright or reduce the cost impact of the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA) will have their fifteen seconds in the sun later today. Their chances of surviving until sundown are slim. The various bills, all with Republican sponsors, are set to be discussed in the Virginia…
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Gerrymandering in Virginia is a Strategic Blunder for Democrats
Democrats are asking voters to protect democracy by abandoning America’s most sacred of democratic principles: that voters get to choose their politicians, and that elections mean something. by Alex Keena Last year, President Donald Trump started a new “redistricting war” when he pressured Republicans in Texas to redraw their state’s congressional district map to help…
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The Most Aggressive Gerrymander of Any State
by Scott Dreyer In what Cardinal News columnist Dwayne Yancey labels “sheer ugliness,” Virginia Democrats on Feb. 5 finally released their proposed new maps to carve up the Old Dominion into 11 new Congressional districts. According to the US Constitution, House seats are apportioned by population, so since Virginia has somewhat over 8 million residents, we have 11 members in the House of Representatives. Of those current 11…
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Taxing Everything That Moves
Leaf blowers, guns, dog walking, dry cleaning—full government control means everything gets taxed in Democrats’ Virginia. by Jacob Grandstaff It’s a truism that when Democrats gain a trifecta—full control of a state’s executive and legislative branches—they tend to tax every human activity. Virginia Democrats are aiming to exceed the stereotype by taxing animal activity, too.…
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Assembly, Dominion Seek to Bill Data Centers for Rising Energy Costs
by Steve Haner Virginia’s major data centers could pay more for electricity and other customers less under a surprise legislative substitute that appeared in email inboxes Sunday and was rapidly approved Monday by a major Virginia Senate committee. The proposal is politically attractive, already being touted a major consumer rate cut, but the detailed accounting…
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Spanberger Has Declared War on the Second Amendment
The Democrat governor is preparing to trample the gun rights of law-abiding Virginians, confirming exactly what critics warned all along. by Bronson Winslow Newly sworn-in Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) is hellbent on turning Virginia into California, keeping her campaign promise to completely gut Virginians’ constitutional right to bear arms. Spanberger, a longtime supporter of the…
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We Have to Destroy Democracy in Order to Save It!
by Chap Petersen About fifty years ago the United States was involved in a military conflict in Vietnam which lasted many years and did not end well. There was a phrase from that era – “We had to destroy the village in order to save it” – which encapsulated its own self-defeating logic. We know better…