Bacon's Rebellion

  • Richmond’s Water-Gate Scandal

    Posted on

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    What an embarrassment. The City of Richmond’s water system shut down Monday, just as the General Assembly was scheduled to convene in the state Capitol. With no working toilets, legislators decided to delay deliberations until next week. As the city struggled to restore service, restaurants closed, a waterless VCU Medical Center turned away ambulances, and citizens were put on a boil-water advisory. Mere days after assuming office, Mayor Danny Avula found himself scrambling to get the water flowing again.

    City officials were able to provide only sketchy details about how a two- to four-inch snowfall knocked out the city’s water system. Media reports suggest a cascading effect involving a snow-related interruption in power to the century-old water-treatment facility, a malfunctioning component that caused flooding, and electrical devices shorting out and rendering pumps inoperable.

    How could this have happened? Avula undoubtedly will launch a probe to explain what went wrong. The inevitable post mortem assuredly will lay out the proximate causes of the fiasco from an engineering perspective. Whether the investigation explores underlying fiscal and management issues depends upon how Avula frames the scope of the inquiry.

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  • Maybe Another Subsidy Will Finally Boost EVs?

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    Steve Haner

    By Steve Haner

    Delegate Irene Shin, D-Herndon

    Yet another effort will be made in 2025 to get Virginia’s two major electric utilities deeper into the business of building and maintaining charging stations for electric vehicles, with their ratepayers – even those who have no interest in such vehicles – having to pay the tab. Given they are supposed to be the no-brainer wave of the future, electric vehicles sure need a whole lot of expensive subsidies and legislative boosting.

    This version of the idea comes in a bill from Delegate Irene Shin, D-Fairfax, who is a member of the House Labor and Commerce Committee, which is likely to first hear the bill. 

    It would repeal a 2021 statute that prohibited the utilities from building out such a network and creating a rate adjustment clause, or RAC, to raise the capital from their customers. Such rate “adders” hitting all customers have become the go-to method for funding most other utility investments, from new power plants and transmission lines to a subsidy program for low-income customers.

    If the utilities seek to develop their own charging network, the bill requires they be barred from building the stations too close to existing private chargers. The State Corporation Commission would be tasked with developing the exclusion zone. But even if utilities build none of their own stations, other elements of the bill guarantee higher costs for their customers to subsidize electrified transportation.

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  • Three Major Proposed Constitutional Amendments

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    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    by Dick Hall-Sizemore

    The 2025 General Assembly will be taking up constitutional amendments on three hot button issues—abortion, voting rights of felons, and same-sex marriage.

    In Virginia, to amend the state constitution, the General Assembly must agree to the proposed amendment twice, with an intervening election for the House of Delegates. If the proposal is approved the second time, it is then submitted to the voters for approval. A majority vote in the referendum is needed for the change to become effective. The Governor has no veto power over proposed constitutional amendments.

    HJR 1—Abortion. The proposal would add a “fundamental right to reproductive freedom” to Virginia’s Bill of Rights. “Reproductive freedom” is defined as including the “ability to make and carry out decisions relating to one’s own prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, postpartum care, contraception, abortion care, miscarriage management, and fertility care.”
    The amendment prohibits one’s reproductive freedom from being “directly, or indirectly, denied, burdened, or infringed upon unless justified by a compelling state interest achieved by the least restrictive means.” The amendment defines a state interest as being compelling “only if it is for the limited purpose of maintaining or improving the health of an individual seeking care, consistent with accepted clinical standards of care and evidence-based medicine, and does not infringe on that individual’s autonomous decision making.”

    The amendment does allow the state to regulate abortion in the third trimester of pregnancy, but it may not prohibit an abortion in the trimester which, in the professional judgment of a doctor, is needed to protect the life or physical or mental health of the mother or when a physician deems the fetus is not viable.

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  • Use AI to Smite AI-Induced Energy Demand

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    James A. Bacon

    Image credit: ChatGPT

    by Felix Garcia

    The Virginia General Assembly convenes tomorrow for its 2025 session among the usual laments that bipartisan solutions to the Commonwealth’s biggest challenges are not possible nowadays.

    But there should be one big issue upon which members of both parties in both houses can agree: Virginia uses more electricity than it creates. With more data centers coming on-line, with more to follow, the situation is only going to get worse. And businesses and consumers are the ones who’ll be paying the bill for the imported electricity required to run them.

    Fixing this problem is no longer just a “challenge” but has become a business imperative for the Commonwealth of Virginia if we are to maintain our position as the best state in the nation for business.

    Energy policy is at a crossroads. We can no longer wait for more studies and study commissions. We must identify solutions that will reduce the amount of expensive electricity that must be imported from other states, and we must do it now.

    To do that, Artificial Intelligence is our friend!

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  • VanValkenburg Tackles Affordable Housing

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    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    Broadly speaking, there are two types of strategies for making housing more affordable: demand-side strategies and supply-side strategies.

    The demand-side approach makes it easier for people to buy houses — lower down-payments, interest-rate subsidies, outright grants. Such tactics might help the lucky individual households that qualify, but only by allowing Homeowner A to outbid Homeowner B, effectively displacing Homeowner B. There’s no net gain in the housing stock, thus no net gain for the population as a whole.

    Supply-side strategies address the root cause of unaffordability: regulations that drive up the cost of construction and restrict the number of new lots. In a market economy, building more housing doesn’t benefit just those moving into the newly constructed dwelling units, it benefits all potential homeowners by altering the supply-demand calculus that determines housing prices.

    Typically, Democrats go for demand-side solutions, aiming to boost the buying power of lower-income households. It hasn’t worked out very well. One would think that Republicans would have leaped into the breach with supply-side solutions, but they haven’t been very imaginative in crafting new legislation.

    But there’s hope in the 2025 General Assembly session. State Senator Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Henrico, is introducing a set of supply-side bills that could do more to move the needle on housing than anything else I’ve seen in Virginia.

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  • Poll: School Accountability System Supported

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    Steve Haner

    By Derrick A. Max

    While Democrats in the Virginia General Assembly appear unanimous in their opposition to the Governor’s new School Performance and Support Framework, there is near unanimous support among registered voters for enhanced educational standards that measure both growth and accountability by student subgroups according to a new poll. 

    In a survey conducted on behalf of the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy by Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy between December 17 and 20, 625 registered voters were asked:  

    QUESTION: Virginia has approved a new framework for school accountability that utilizes comprehensive data, including academic proficiency and academic growth measures by student subgroups. This data would be made easily available and understandable, so parents know how well their child and local school are performing. Do you support or oppose this new framework?

    The poll shows that 86 percent of registered voters in Virginia support a new accountability framework – with almost no variation in support by race, age, gender, region, or even political party. This data should be a wake-up call to Democrats in the General Assembly.

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  • The Real Reason Dem Legislators Hate New Accountability System

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    James A. Bacon

    Image credit: ChatGPT

    by James A. Bacon

    Democratic legislators in the General Assembly want to delay implementation of the state’s school accountability system that is scheduled to go into place next school year. Critics have called the rollout of the new system “rushed.”

    The new standards would identify failing schools in “need of intensive support.” Although the Youngkin administration would never be so impolitic as to use the “f” word (failure), reasonable people can infer from the deplorable Standards of Learning pass rates of their students, that these schools are educational disaster zones.

    Youngkin’s plan is to provide $50 million of targeted funding to these schools. Remarkably, Democratic legislators, for whom the answer to every ill usually is “more money,” are spurning this gesture. Sen. Ghazala Hashimi, D-Chesterfield, says the sum is “a drop in the bucket” compared to what’s needed.

    The question arises: Since when do Virginia Democrats turn down more money for schools?

    Here’s my take: “Progressive” lawmakers hate the new system because it will expose the massive failure of school districts run by uber-woke school boards and administrators.

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  • Oops! VEA Owns Itself

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    Photo credit: Grok

    by Todd Truitt

    In its lobbying efforts to try to kill the new school accountability system, the Virginia Education Association (the state-level “teachers union” organization, or VEA) has produced a report that strongly supports the new system.

    In what would be described as an “own goal” by soccer parents, the key findings from the VEA’s report (inadvertently) validate how the new accountability system is effectively (i) showing Virginia’s educational inequality, including significant funding differences and staffing problems, (ii) demonstrating that Virginia needs to better direct resources to these struggling schools and (iii) distinguishing among schools at all levels.

    The next step for the new accountability system is for the legislature to appropriate additional funds for those struggling schools to be identified as needing support when the new system takes effect next school year. The governor’s budget proposed $50 million in additional funds for such schools. I expect that Virginia’s legislative Democrats will propose to increase this amount.

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  • Poll Shows Partisan Divide on Natural Gas, Solar Site Approvals

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    Steve Haner

    By Steve Haner

    Virginia registered voters are strongly in favor of allowing utilities to build new natural gas generation plants, a key issue facing Virginia because current state law mandates the complete elimination of that fuel source for electricity generation in 15 years.   

    On another key energy issue likely to face the 2025 General Assembly starting Wednesday, Virginians are also opposed to the creation of a new state oversight process that would be empowered to override local objections to the construction of large solar farms. In that case, however, the division is closer — with about half of the Democrats and even one third of the Republicans polled in favor of such a bill.   

    The survey was conducted on behalf of the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy by Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy. Between December 17 and 20, 625 registered voters were questioned. The Thomas Jefferson Institute questions were part of a larger survey conducted by Mason-Dixon on multiple other issues.  

    Republican leaders and legislators are getting a clear message on both of these question from their base voters. The message is more mixed for Democrats, and their leadership clearly should at least reconsider the “no way, no how” approach on using natural gas for electricity in the future. But the political analysis always must focus on the Independents, and there Virginia’s Democrats are clearly out of step, while Republicans are in line with the voters both sides need to win the 2025 election contests. 

    On the bitter cold morning this was being written, the vast majority of the electricity being generated along the eastern seaboard came from natural gas or coal, both fuels Democratic Party orthodoxy and state law insist must go away. Dominion Energy Virginia is pushing back in its latest integrated resource plan, proposing instead to add up to 6,000 megawatts of additional gas plants in coming years. The idea is being bitterly opposed.  

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  • Should This College be Closed?

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    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    by Dick Hall-Sizemore

    Richard Bland College

    Richard Bland College, in Dinwiddie County just outside the city of Petersburg, is an anomaly among Virginia higher ed institutions. It is the only public residential two-year college in the state.

    As its formal title, Richard Bland College of William and Mary, indicates, it is affiliated with the College of William and Mary. By law, Richard Bland is “under the supervision, management, and control” of the William and Mary Board of Visitors.

    For some time, Richard Bland has chafed at this governance arrangement. Recently there has been this sequence of actions:

    1. The 2022 Appropriation Act included language originally proposed by then-Del. Emily Brewer (R-Smithfield) directing the college to provide a plan “on the steps necessary to transition to an innovative model for higher education that prepares citizens for jobs in high-demand fields and in industries critical to the economic development of the Petersburg area, Virginia Gateway Region and Commonwealth of Virginia.”
    2. A 2022 report , in response to the Appropriation Act language, from the college recommending the establishment of “a board of visitors dedicated to sole governance of [Richard Bland College].”
    3. Legislation introduced in the 2023 General Assembly, SB 1077 (Ruff, R-Mecklenburg) and HB 1415 (Brewer, R-Smithfield) to provide Richard Bland with an independent board of visitors. The Senate bill passed unanimously, but both bills died in the House Appropriations Committee.
    4. The 2023 Appropriation Act directed the Secretary of Education to evaluate “a new governance model building upon the November 2022 report issued by Richard Bland College.”
    5. The Secretary of Education released her report in mid-August 2024. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported on the recommendations here. The actual report can be found here.
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  • Sweet Briar Challenge and the Indomitable Mary Pope Hutson (Part 2)

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    Image credit: Sweet Brian College

    by Margot Heffernan

    “As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”
    ― Virginia Woolf

    Sweet Briar College. It’s a unique place. Inimitable, really. Rich in women’s history. The College was built on the will of its founder, Indiana Fletcher Williams, in memory of her deceased 16-year-old daughter. Indeed, it’s a women’s college in the most integral sense.

    Over the past decade, though, this small women’s college located in Amherst, Virginia, has been afflicted. Plagued by the same blight that has spread through virtually every province of society.

    Gender ideology. It has settled in at Sweet Briar where large segments of the student body stand in defense of admitting the “gender diverse,” including men who think they are women. In fact, many faculty and board members have been swindled into thinking that people can change sex. That men who imagine themselves women should receive special empathy. That we should give into their delusions and call them “women” because they tell us to.

    Women must be gracious.  Isn’t this what we have been told since antiquity? Be kind, dear! And isn’t this the same admonition we are given now, in tacit and overt fashion when a man or boy claims womanhood? Be kind, dear, be kind!

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  • Jeanine’s Memes

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    From The Bull Elephant

  • One Way to Get Higher Ed to Cut Expenses

    Posted on

    by

    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    Many participants on this blog will welcome a provision Governor Youngkin included in his proposed budget bill that has received little notice in the press: a cap on college tuition and fees for Virginia students. The provision would impose an absolute cap for FY 2026 and limit increases in succeeding years to 2.5 percent or the inflation rate, whichever is lower.

  • SB 805 Tries to Squeeze Blood from Turnip

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Image credit: Bing Image Creator

    by Hans Bader

    Legislation has been introduced in the Virginia legislature to increase child-support obligations a lot, even for parents with very low incomes. The legislation, SB 805, violates federal child-support regulations, such as 45 CFR § 302.56(c)(1), by imposing excessive child support obligations on thousands of parents that they will be unable to pay, and leave them unable to meet their basic needs. 45 CFR § 302.56(c)(1) requires state child-support guidelines to take into account the “ability to pay” and “the basic subsistence needs of the noncustodial parent.”

    To comply with that federal regulation, adopted in 2016, Virginia’s neighbors, such as North Carolina, Maryland, and Tennessee, do not impose significant child support obligations on parents making less than $1,300 per month, because parents that poor cannot afford to pay much child support while housing and feeding themselves. Moreover, the Maryland “child support obligation” is reduced by a “self–support reserve” to enable noncustodial parents to subsist.

    Under this Virginia bill to increase child support (SB 805), the basic child support obligation will be an unaffordable $264 to $665 per month for households making $1,300 per month (depending on the number of kids they have). For parents making $550 per month, basic child support is between $114 and $287 per month, which is well beyond their ability to pay.

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  • Hokum, History and Harm: Gender Ideology at Sweet Briar College (Part 1)

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    by Margot Heffernan

    Image credit: Sweet Briar College

    “Only men could oppress women for thousands of years, then turn around, put on a dress, and complain that they are the most marginalized group in society.” — Kara Dansky

    Remember the Seven Sisters – the original prestigious and renowned women’s colleges that dot the Northeast? Mount Holyoke College, Vassar College, Wellesley College, Smith College, Radcliffe College, Bryn Mawr College, and Barnard College were designed to replicate the elite educational experience that the Ivies provided for men. By the 1960’s there were 200 all-women’s colleges, many having evolved out of the abolitionist cause.

    Women’s colleges have, in fact, shaped generations of females, including Katherine Hepburn, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Martha Stewart, Joan Rivers and Meryl Streep.

    Over time, the number of women’s colleges dwindled – there are fewer than 40 in the US now – and the concept seems quaint; antiquated. An anachronism, some say, or an unnecessary hold-off from a bygone era. Fewer and fewer of these colleges are now dedicated solely to the education of women.

    But the major assault on historically women’s colleges was yet to come with the seeming arrival of another species of woman, one so put upon and marginalized by a cruel society that an entire civil rights movement was required to level the playing field for “her.”

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Now Available

Book cover of 'Dust Mites: A Second American Revolution' by James A. Bacon, featuring astronauts planting a flag with a blue and white emblem on a lunar landscape, with Earth visible in the background.
For sale on Amazon.com

The year: 2075. The American colonies on the Moon are getting restless under Washington’s tyrannical rule….

This second edition of “Dust Mites” has a snazzy new cover, includes helpful lunar maps, and is 5,000 words tighter than the original. The sequel, “Trogs,” is scheduled for publication this summer.

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Bacon’s Rebellion is Virginia’s leading politically non-aligned portal for news, opinions and analysis about state, regional and local public policy. Read more about us here.

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