and as George Bailey said in It’s a Wonderful Life:
This is a very interesting situation
Having seen three different polls (one public and two private) that show the constitutional amendment to re-gerrymander Virginia’s congressional districts is under 50%, the odds of its passage on April 21st are clearly in doubt.
No wonder national Democrats are pouring money into the Commonwealth to win this vote.
This is not a done deal. Hence the money.
Okay. Let’s play it out…suppose the amendment passes.
Democrats then have a clear path to a 10-1 federal delegation in the House of Representatives.
The GOP would be on track to losing districts 1, 2, 5, and 6 as none of them would have less than 56% of the vote going to Democrats based on the 2025 gubernatorial landslide victory of Abigail Spanberger.
What would Republicans and Independents then do in these new districts if they know the very likely outcome in November is a Democratic representative?
Proposed legislation reopens questions into the validity of the state’s investigation into VMI student culture.
he past six years at VMI have been defined by the microscopic look into VMl’s student body culture by the state of Virginia. Photo courtesy of Pikabuu2 via the Creative Commons License
by Jackson Doane
It’s commonly said that good fences make good neighbors. Between Washington and Lee (W&L) and the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), nothing separates us but a short walk, yet we have long been good neighbors. So when news broke in January that two bills were introduced in the General Assembly that would limit VMl’s ability to selfgovern, I felt it only right to look into why our neighbors were suddenly under scrutiny.
House Bill 1374 and House Bill 1377 were recently introduced, and since then, the complicated and, at times, hostile relationship between the school and the state government – which dates back at least five and a half years – has resurfaced with renewed intensity.
In October 2020, a front-page article in the Washington Post detailed allegations of racially discriminatory incidents at VMI over the preceding years. The story drew national attention, especially in the wake of a summer and fall of race-based political protests, and thrust VMI into the national spotlight.
The article caught the attention of the then-governor at the time, Ralph Northam, who is also a VMI alumnus. He co-signed a letter with the lieutenant governor and attorney general to VMl’s Board of Visitors, the school’s governing body, calling for a “state-funded, independent third-party review” of the student body’s culture, particularly regarding students of nonwhite ethnicities.
Northam’s letter described what he believed to be a “clear and appalling culture of ongoing structural racism at the Virginia Military Institute.” That letter, combined with national media attention and pressure from state officials, led the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) to commission an investigation by the third-party law firm Barnes & Thornburg, which released a report published in June 2021. The 2021 report The SCHEV investigation at VMI was conducted from January 7, 2021, to June 1, 2021, spanning a period of 145 days. According to SCHEV, it was done with the purpose of investigating allegations of racism and sexism at VMI.
The Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia has published its mid-decade population for Virginia and its localities. Summary from the Weldon Cooper website:
Virginia’s population reached 8.88 million as of July 1, 2025, an increase of more than 248,000 residents since the 2020 Census. Between 2020 and 2025, the state’s average annual growth rate was 0.5 percent, slightly below the national rate of 0.6 percent. Virginia remains the 12th most populous state and ranked 11th nationally in numeric population growth during this period.
Of the state’s population increase since 2020, natural increase (births minus deaths) contributed 78,388 people (31.5 percent), while net migration (people moving in minus people moving out) added 170,326 people (68.5 percent).
Virginia’s world-leading data center industry, once a source of economic pride to our Commonwealth, has become the scapegoat of the 2026 General Assembly. The State Senate and House of Delegates have built different altars for its sacrifice.
The Senate is about to vote to strip away the major sales and use tax exemption which has helped make Virginia the center of this burgeoning industry. This would raise the taxes they pay by more than $1 billion initially and then up to $2 billion annually, an infusion of cash the Senate will happily find ways to spend.
House Democrats have gone a different direction, keeping the exemption but making it conditional upon the industry adopting a fully Green New Deal energy policy. Ending any reliance on natural gas or diesel generation is the stated goal. Companies would be forced to buy renewable energy certificates on an even faster schedule than the Virginia Clean Economy Act requires for Dominion Energy Virginia and Appalachian Power Company.
And both chambers have approved versions of legislation that will allow the State Corporation Commission (SCC) to assign 100 percent of the future costs of Dominion Energy Virginia’s energy capacity purchases and transmission upgrades onto that one industry. There is no reason that approach will not spread beyond Dominion if the SCC goes along, given politicians are already bragging this will lower bills for everybody else.
There was considerable reaction to my recent article regarding the U.S. Dept. of Justice suing Virginia for not turning over an unredacted copy of the statewide list of registered voters.
Two comments in particular struck me as needing some response from me. Matt Hurt posed this question: “The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 and the Help America Vote Act of 2002 both require states to maintain accurate voter rolls, and both provide DOJ with the authority to enforce them. If DOJ doesn’t have access to that information, how can it ensure states are compliant with these laws?” After considerable discussion, Nathan had a request of me: “I hope you will follow up, to provide the information necessary for a more complete understanding of this issue.”
These are legitimate questions and requests. I was out of the house for most of the day both Saturday and Sunday and thus not in a position to respond. I have now done some research and can provide some follow-up.
First, my major concern with this request lies with how DOJ said it was going to use it. In its MOU that DOJ asked agencies to agree to is this statement: “You agree therefore that within forty-five (45) days of receiving that notice from the Justice Department of any issues, insufficiencies, inadequacies, deficiencies, anomalies, or concerns, your state will clean its VRL/Data by removing ineligible voters.”
Simply stated, DOJ would examine a state’s voter registration list and identify ineligible voters for the state to remove from its registration list. This would be an extraordinary step. The state would be relinquishing a key component of its authority to administer elections. Identifying “ineligible” voters is prone to many errors, especially for the federal government, which is removed from the details of individual registration statuses. Even state governments, in their effort to purge ineligible voters, inadvertently remove eligible voters in the process. For example, in 2024, the Youngkin administration revoked the registration of approximately 1,600 eligible voters in its effort to find noncitizens who had registered.
Turning to the legal authority for the current DOJ request for unredacted statewide registration data, the federal government cited the following federal legislation statutes:
As VA Dems push gun control on Virginia, we learn that Dem State leader @SenLouiseLucas’ own daughter, Theresa Lucas Lamb, was charged for bringing a loaded gun through security at Norfolk Airport in 2024
Want a political version of blunt force trauma? Then welcome to Virginia’s April 21 referendum on congressional redistricting. Look at the map and behold the winners. No one has to be fair about “fairness.”
It’s “temporary,” they keep saying. Temporary — as in, it won’t last long.
You could say as much about the vaunted redistricting commission. Installed via a constitutional amendment but five years ago, it proved very temporary.
Appointed to a college or university board by the governor? That’s temporary, too.
Such appointments were previously tantamount to service. There was no pause in between or abrupt removal. You even got a certificate, suitable for framing: “To All To Whom These Presents Shall Come — Greeting. Know Ye, that from special trust and confidence reposed in his fidelity, our Governor by virtue of authority vested in him by law, hath appointed and hereby commissions …”
I pulled that language right off a certificate in the hallway, which names moi to the Board of Visitors of Virginia Commonwealth University in 2009. It’s signed by Gov. Tim Kaine.
Republican Speaker Bill Howell, with his party’s majority in the House of Delegates then, could have killed that appointment dead to rights. He did not. Why? Because Speaker Howell was an honorable public servant who respected Virginia’s governing traditions.
Or maybe Speaker Howell just shrugged and said to himself, “Jeez, that twit,” and let my appointment go with no more thought.
As the Virginia General Assembly enters the final weeks of its 2026 session, a wave of new labor mandates is about to reach the Governor’s desk, two of which she has promised to sign, and one she seems inclined to support as well.
House Bill 5 (Paid Sick Leave), Senate Bill 2 (Paid Family and Medical Leave), and House and Senate Bill 1 ($15 minimum wage) are moving through both chambers, putting the Commonwealth on the verge of a fundamental transformation in its labor market — one that carries a rigid and predictable consequence for every small and medium sized business in the Commonwealth.
For those tracking the economic health of Virginia, these aren’t just “wage and benefit” bills; they represent a coordinated, multi-layered surcharge on the act of hiring. When you combine a $15 minimum wage with a new sick leave mandate and a paid family and medical leave tax, you are pricing growth out of reach for many smaller firms, and reducing employment for low productivity, entry-level employees.
The 3.3% Base
House Bill 5 mandates one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked. This calculates to a fixed 3.33% mandatory increase in the cost of labor.
In my Feb. 13 podcast, former Finance Secretary Steve Cummings explained the positive feedback loop between strong state finances and economic development. His observations about the fiscal flywheel effect are worth highlighting here.–JAB
Cummings: “The underlying premise here is growth. When you have a declining revenue stream, when you have declining population, you’re gonna have a really hard time running a government and running it effectively.
“Through the policies that the governor implemented, we’ve attracted companies, we’ve added 277,000 jobs over the term of the governor’s administration. There’s still 220,000 open jobs, not counting jobs that aren’t yet open, but 85,000 new jobs that are in the economic development pipeline to be delivered over the next five years. And that does not include the 40,000 construction jobs that are associated with them. So, when you put all that together, it’s like 600,000 people who still are looking to fill jobs and growth that’s coming. So, Virginia has jobs.
“This is the narrative that we think is fact-based and others don’t want to talk about. And the reality is that at 220,000, we have 1.6 jobs for every unemployed person in Virginia. Nationally, it’s under one. That dynamic is underlying your revenue stream because withholding is our biggest revenue source. And that is what can help the flywheel get going here, where we are successful in generating revenues that continue to grow and which allows us to fund other things and reduce taxes.
“You can look at a couple other key states here. North Carolina is the best example. They got that flywheel going five to 10 years ago, and they have been consistently reducing taxes while their budget has increased.”
Dr. Cameron Webb, Virginia State Health Commissioner
Virginia has joined 23 other states and the District of Columbia in rejecting the new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control regarding childhood vaccinations.
The CDC guidelines no longer include hepatitis A and B, rotavirus, flu, COVID-19 and meningitis in the routine immunization schedule.
Explaining that the recent changes in the CDC guidelines were made “in the absence of new data or safety signals to prompt such an update,” Dr. Cameron Webb, Virginia State Commissioner of Health, in a recent letter to clinicians throughout the state, said that the Virginia Dept. of Health “strongly recommends that all children in the Commonwealth be vaccinated in accordance with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Recommended Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule” instead.
It's ANOTHER faculty letter attacking the presidential search committee — asking the new BOV to restart its search for a UVA president (even though we have one) and pause the search for an Executive VP and Provost.
The chief prosecutor of Fairfax County is letting some killers escape a conviction by accepting insanity pleas that would almost certainly be rejected by a jury. The insanity defense is used in less than 1% of criminal cases and is successful only about 25% of the time, making it a rare and difficult defense to employ. Defendants typically have to prove, by clear and convincing evidence, that they were unable to distinguish right from wrong due to severe mental disease or defect at the time of the crime. Merely having a mental disorder is not enough to establish an insanity defense. It is the defendant who has the burden of proving insanity.
Joshua Danehower, plead Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity for shooting a man ten times in his bed.
But Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano (D) has let 11 killers avoid conviction by accepting their plea of “Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity.” That’s about a fifth of the killers recently arrested in Fairfax County. So killers are 100 times more likely to avoid a conviction by claiming to be insane in Fairfax County than they would be in the rest of America. Even though there is no reason to think insanity is more common in Fairfax County than in the rest of the country, much less 100 times more common.
As Mary Katharine Hamm notes, “A man murdered Gret Glyer execution style, shot him” ten times “as he slept next to his wife.” The killing was premeditated, and the killer “even wrote it down in ‘The Plan.’” Yet Descano’s office has now accepted “a flimsy insanity plea” to send the killer to a “mental health facility, where he will be evaluated and eligible for release soon and over and over, each time potentially free and dangerous again.”
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 year and an increase in the income tax standard deduction.
The Senate, however, allows the existing sales tax exemption for the data center industry to expire at the end of 2026, which raises almost an additional $1 billion over the next two years. A portion of the sales tax is dedicated to transportation, and the extra sales tax money to be paid by the data centers is earmarked for public transit in Northern Virginia.
The full Senate and House are expected to pass their competing budget bills in the coming week, setting up the annual conference committee process to reconcile differences before the scheduled General Assembly adjournment on March 14. Because of the Senate’s move against the data centers and its proposed tax reforms, a contentious conference is possible.
Both budgets include an increase of the base legislative salary to $45,000 per year starting in 2028. Neither committee discussed the raises openly during their meetings, with the only mention coming when a Senate Republican spoke up to announce he would abstain on that individual item.
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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