Author Archives: Dick Hall-Sizemore

Here and There Around the Commonwealth

Posted on November 15, 2023 | 52 comments

Virginia History

For those interested in Virginia history, here are two great sources.  One is new; one is not new, but I just discovered it.

Cardinal News has started a three-year project  “to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the march to independence in advance of the nation’s observation of its 250th anniversary, or Semi-quincentennial.”  In addition to a story about the chosen topic, Dwight Yancey, editor of Cardinal News, has promised “occasional columns about the politics of the era, written the same way I’d write them today.”  The project is called Cardinal 250. The first monthly article, about the “Proclamation Line of 1763,” and Yancey’s political analysis, which is a lot of fun, can be found here.

The other item is the website Virginia Places.  This is the brainchild of Manassas resident Charles Grymes, who first created it in 1998 for a geography class he was teaching at George Mason University. He has lovingly nurtured it ever since.  It now consists of 1,000 pages on topics ranging from agriculture to Virginia journeys.  Grymes describes the website as “an exploration into what makes Virginia special. It is an interdisciplinary journey through the history, economics, geology, biology, sociology, and other -ologies that can help explain how Virginia has evolved in the past, and what the state may look like in the future.”  It is a work in progress which he describes as “far from complete.”  He is constantly adding to it and updating content added earlier.  I have run across items from this website in my search for sources for articles for this blog and I did not realize what it was.  Now I know; it is a delightful treasure trove of information about the Commonwealth.

Perpetual Election Machine

Ah, to live in Virginia where there is always an election campaign in progress.  It is not enough that, right after we have finished a heated campaign for General Assembly seats, we have U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger announcing that she is not going to run for reelection to Congress, but will be running for governor in 2025, thereby ensuring that, before the present governor is through half his term, we will be talking about who is going to replace him.  Now we have Del. John McGuire (R-Goochland), recently elected to the Virginia Senate, announcing he will challenge Republican Fifth District Congressman Bob Good in a primary next year.

As reported by Cardinal News, McGuire, in an email to his supporters (at least it was not on X), declared that Good “has failed us time and time again.”  He declared that Good had “abandoned” Donald Trump by endorsing Ron DeSantis in next year’s Presidential primaries.  He went on to assert that Good voted for Kevin McCarthy for Speaker, then “threw a temper tantrum, reversed himself, and allowed the party to fall into chaos, costing us the 2023 elections.”   As a result of those elections, “Marxist Democrats now control the Virginia General Assembly, which is going to hurt the people of Virginia badly.”  That last comment should endear him to his fellow legislators and encourage smooth inter-party relations.

RWH

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Posted in Uncategorized

Rumblings Among House Republicans

Posted on November 11, 2023 | 28 comments

Del. Don Scott (D-Portsmouth), Minority Leader

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

Del. Don Scott (D-Portsmouth), the current Minority Leader in the House of Delegates, seems to be on a smooth glide path to making history by being elected Speaker when the General Assembly convenes in January. The fate of the current Speaker, Todd Gilbert (R-Shenandoah), is less certain.

Del. Todd Gilbert (R-Shenandoah), currently Speaker

One might logically expect a Speaker to maintain leadership of his party caucus after it moved from the majority to minority. But it seems that some members are unhappy, and that Del. Terry Kilgore (R-Scott), the current Majority Leader, is campaigning to be the Republican floor leader in the next Session, rather than Gilbert. The Virginia Political Newsletter reports that the unhappiness of some members stems from feeling that “the talking point of a new 15-week restriction was forced upon them by House leadership and Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s PAC, Spirit of Virginia.” One Republican delegate told the newsletter, on the condition of anonymity, “Many of us understood that the messaging and focus on the abortion issue was wrong from the start, and would hurt Republicans, especially in competitive districts.”

Del. Terry Kilgore (R-Scott), currently Majority Leader

It is not uncommon for legislators to rebel against their leadership when their party loses its majority status. In fact, Scott owes his current position to a coup he led two years ago against then-Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn (D-Fairfax) after the Democrats were toppled from the majority.

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Posted in General Assembly, Politics, Uncategorized

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Posted on November 11, 2023 | 9 comments

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Posted in Uncategorized

More Bad News for the Governor

Posted on November 9, 2023 | 29 comments

Yesterday was a bad day for Gov. Glenn Youngkin.  In addition to having to absorb the news about losing both houses of the General Assembly to the Democrats, he learned that the federal General Services Administration has decided to locate the long-coveted new FBI headquarters in Maryland rather than Virginia.  That was bad news for the Commonwealth as a whole, as well.

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Posted in Economic development

Additional Electoral Jolts

Posted on November 8, 2023 | 42 comments

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

It has long been evident that Henrico County has been changing, both demographically and politically. The results of this week’s elections were the culmination of that long-term trend.

The county has a history of continuity in its Board of Supervisors membership with members serving for many years. This year, two long-serving board members, Patricia O’Bannon and Frank Thornton, both of whom will complete 28 years on the board this year, announced their retirements.  (Thornton was the first Black elected to the board.)

The partisan breakdown of the board has been three Republicans and two Democrats for many years, except for a brief interlude in 2018 when a Democrat was elected in a special election following the death of a long-serving Republican. She resigned from the board seven months later after getting into a nasty squabble with other board members, including her fellow Democrats, who said she was not playing by their internal rules. A Republican won in the ensuing special election. Continue reading →

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Posted in Elections

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A Day in the Election Trenches

Posted on November 7, 2023 | 59 comments

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

I just finished my first stint as an election official.  I was surprised by some aspects but, upon retrospect, I should not have been surprised.

Voters came in steadily throughout the day, with some backups occurring.  The biggest push was between 5:15 and 6:15, when the line was much longer. But it cleared fairly quickly and voters did not have to wait more than about 15 minutes at the most.

About 1,350 folks voted, which constituted a turnout of 35 percent of the active registered voters in the precinct.

Some of that turnout undoubtedly was the result of the failure of voters to know about, and understand, the changes wrought by redistricting. The precinct’s candidates for the House and Senate in the General Assembly were unopposed Democrats. However, Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant (R) had represented the area for many years in the General Assembly. Redistricting put her in a new district which did not include this precinct. She was being challenged by Del. Schuyler VanValkenburg (D), who has represented the precinct in the House of Delegates for several years. That contest is one of the key ones in the state and there has been heavy advertising on TV by both candidates. Many voters were puzzled and frustrated when they found that neither Dunnavant nor VanValkenburg was on their ballots. I overheard one man lamenting that he had come to the polls specifically to vote against one of those candidates. Continue reading →

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Posted in Electoral process

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That’s One Way to Cut Down on Health Care Costs

Posted on November 6, 2023 | 20 comments

Tim Griffin, Republican candidate for 53rd House District

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

Just as the Democrats and Republicans get rid of their embarrassments in the Virginia Senate (Joe Morrissey and Amanda Chase, respectively), it appears the Republicans will be electing another one for the House.

Following up on a report by The Daily Progress in Charlottesville, Dwayne Yancey reports today in Cardinal News that Tim Griffin, the Republican candidate for the district that covers parts of Bedford, Nelson, and Amherst counties, has defied multiple court orders to pay for the support of his children. In 2021, a court ordered Griffin to pay his ex-wife for health care coverage for their two young children, spousal support, and legal fees. It appears that, soon after that order was entered, he cancelled the health coverage for his children and has not paid the other required amounts. He now owes more than $33,000.

Furthermore, some Republicans have raised questions about whether he even lives in the district, going so far as to hire a private investigator to figure out where he lives.

There was a time when such revelations would have been devastating to a candidacy. But, this is a heavily Republican district and the Democratic candidate seems to be running an uninspired campaign. Therefore, it looks as if there will be a scofflaw in the legislature voting on laws that apply to the rest of us.

It could be asked why the Republicans did not do a better job of vetting their candidate, who was chosen in a convention. It just so happens that the chairman of the Republican Party in Bedford County, “home to most of the voters in this district, is none other than Griffin himself.”

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Posted in Elections, Politics

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Musings on Virginia Politics

Posted on October 31, 2023 | 9 comments

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

Southwest Virginia elections—The folks in the Mt. Rogers region take their politics seriously. Along all those mountain roads are numerous assemblages of campaign signs like the one shown above, although this is small in comparison to some. (You gotta love a candidate nicknamed “Stingy”!) Because the General Assembly seats are, for the most part, uncontested, the action is with the campaigns for local offices.

Bellwether—The national columnist, E.J. Dionne, Jr., has picked up on David Toscano’s theme of Virginia being a bellwether state. In a recent column, he argues that both parties in Virginia are resorting to the familiar tactic of getting their voters to the polls by “scaring the daylights out of them.”

The Democrats are warning ominously that Republicans, “MAGA extremists,” if they take over both houses of the legislature, will abolish abortion. For their part, Republicans are declaring that Democrats want to defund the police and let criminals “walk easy.” As Joshua Cole, a Democrat running for a House seat in the Fredericksburg area told Dionne, “It’s either abortion or it’s crime.”

Dionne concludes, “Both parties will be intensely watching Virginia for clues about 2024’s political atmosphere…. The upshot: huge sums of money dropped on a few places are turning Virginia into a laboratory where competing theories about what moves voters are being tested.”

Local elections are the most fun–Speaking of local elections, Dwight Yancey of Cardinal News has a fascinating summary of local elections around the state, albeit mostly in the western part.  It includes a description of three indicted Republican candidates on the ballots.

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Posted in Elections, Politics

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A Long Time Ago in a World Far Far Away

Posted on October 30, 2023 | 36 comments

Mafic dike in wall of granite. Roadcut on VA Rt. 16 near Mouth of Wilson Baptist Church

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

This past weekend I went back in Virginia’s history. Waaaay back. Over a billion years back.

The occasion was the 2023 Virginia Geological Field Conference. This is an annual event staged by a group of leading geologists in the state. Attending were faculty members from several institutions, including one community college; geologists from the United States Geological Service; staff from several state agencies, such as the Department of Environmental Equality; college students, folks from the private sector; and one or two non-geologists (such as me) who nevertheless are keenly interested in the science.

We met in the Mt. Rogers area (the site of the conference rotates among Virginia’s five geographic regions). There we spent a day and a half traveling among sites that have been explored and mapped by USGS geologists over the past few years. We would go to a site, get a briefing from the lead USGS geologist and then go crawl over and around the rocks, with many using their geologist’s hammer to break off chunks for examination. As for me, I would stand in front of a wall of rock or hold a chunk in my hand and ask one of the USGS or other geologists, “Tell me what I am looking at.” Continue reading →

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Posted in Science & Technology, Virginia history

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List of Wrongly Purged Voter Registrations Gets Larger

Posted on October 30, 2023 | 76 comments

Susan Beals, Commissioner,
Va. Dept. of Elections

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

Remember my earlier report on the Youngkin administration cancelling the registrations of voters eligible to vote? These were felons whose voting rights had been restored who had committed a parole violation, which shows up as a felony in the State Police’s official crime database.

In mid-October, the state Department of Elections reported that there are only about 275 individuals affected. Now, it is up to 3,400.

When VPM, Richmond’s public radio station, first reported the errors, the administration was dismissive of the reports. Later, it minimized the extent of the problem. Now, it is trying to shift the blame. Jeff Goettman, the Governor’s chief of staff, says the administration suspects the errors “are the result of antiquated data systems and insufficient processes maintained over the last 20 plus years.” Anyone who has worked with data knows that, when one grabs a bunch of data that was compiled for one purpose and uses it for an entirely different purpose, one needs to be especially careful and needs to be thoroughly familiar with the dataset that is being relied upon. Anyone except, apparently, the folks at the Department of Elections.

To cover himself, the Governor has ordered the Office of the Inspector General to investigate the “circumstances, data systems, and practices” surrounding this event and, as a counter measure, to prepare a separate report examining whether thousands of residents had been left on the registration rolls despite having been convicted of a new felony.

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Posted in Elections, Electoral process, Governance

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Navy Helicopter Pilot Stands Up to MAGA Bullies

Posted on October 20, 2023 | 23 comments

Virginia Rep. Jen Kiggans, (R-Second District)

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

Although I probably disagree with most of her policy stands, if I lived in her district, I would vote for Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-02) solely on the basis of her resistance to elevating Jim Jordan to Speaker of the House of Representatives. She not only voted against Jordan twice, but she supported the compromise proposal to expand the authority of the interim Speaker pro tempore. One of her Virginia Republican colleagues, Bob Good (Fifth District), firmly resisted that proposal because it would (gasp!) mean working with Democrats. Kiggans denounced “the chaos caused by the minority of the majority.”

Caveat: If she again ran against Elaine Luria, who served on the January 6 Commission, it would be an awfully tough choice. That area produces tough female politicians.

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Posted in Politics

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Making Mischief With Election Law Changes

Posted on October 17, 2023 | 12 comments

Rep. Bob Good, Photo credit: Richmond Times Dispatch

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

Here is a recent tweak in election law that did not get a lot of public attention. Effective January 1, 2024, it will be almost impossible for a political party to use a convention to nominate a candidate for a Congressional district seat.  On its face the law still allows a political party of a district to determine how the nomination of candidate is made, but the 2021 change makes this stipulation:

A method of nomination shall not be selected if such method will have the practical effect of excluding participation in the nominating process by qualified voters who are otherwise eligible to participate in the nominating process under that political party’s rules but are unable to attend meetings because they are (i) a member of a uniformed service, as defined in § 24.2-452, on active duty; (ii) temporarily residing outside of the United States; (iii) a student attending a school or institution of higher education; (iv) a person with a disability; or (v) a person who has a communicable disease of public health threat as defined in § 32.1-48.06 or who may have come in contact with a person with such disease. However, such restriction shall not apply when selecting a candidate for a special election or nominating a candidate pursuant to § 24.2-539, or in the event that no candidate files the required paperwork by the deadline prescribed in § 24.2-522. Continue reading →

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Posted in Elections, Electoral process, Politics

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Capitol Fortress

Posted on October 13, 2023 | 11 comments

Virginia General Assembly Building (new)

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

With the opening of the new General Assembly Building this month came other reminders of how the world has changed.

It was not that long ago that staff and tourists could walk unimpeded into the Capitol building. One could drive into the circle beyond the gate fronting on Grace Street to pick someone up or drop off a passenger. One could drive on the street between Capitol Square and Old City Hall and even park there on weekends (so long as one did not park in Senate Clerk Susan Schar’s space).

First, it was the Capitol. Visitors without a State ID now have to trek down the hill and enter through an underground entrance and then walk back up several flights of stairs to get to the interior of the Capitol.

Now, the area has the look of a fortress. There is a large gatehouse at the Grace Street entrance along with a large iron gate. The street entrances off Broad St. have gates manned by Capitol Police.

This is not meant to be a criticism. It is a lamentation over the realities of the present era.

Capitol Square, main entrance fronting Grace St.

Capitol Square, street entrance off Broad St., next to General Assembly Building

Capitol Square, street exit onto Broad St.

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Posted in General Assembly

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Democrats for Crime Witnesses and Victims

Posted on October 13, 2023 | 33 comments

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

For those readers of this blog who contend that Democrats and “progressive” prosecutors are fixated on not prosecuting violent criminals and ignoring the needs of witnesses and victims, I have some good news for you.

Witness Protection

Since 1994 Virginia has had a statute authorizing the Virginia State Police to establish a witness protection program. However, because it has never been specifically funded, it has been seldom, if ever, used. (Never mind that the Department of State Police had GF balances at the end of FY 2022 of $32 million and $10 million in FY 2021.)

In March 2021, Steve Descano, the Commonwealth’s attorney for Fairfax County and Ramin Fatehi, then the deputy Commonwealth’s attorney for Norfolk, published an op-ed in The Virginian-Pilot calling on the General Assembly to fully fund the Witness Protection Program. They pointed out the problems that police and prosecutors have in getting witnesses to come forward due to their being threatened or otherwise intimidated. “Witness protection programs — which provide for the security or relocation of witnesses away from those who might wish them harm — are among the most effective means of counteracting witness intimidation,” they contended. Continue reading →

33 Comments

Posted in Crime, Corrections and Law Enforcement

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A Day in Court

Posted on October 11, 2023 | 15 comments

Henrico County Courthouse

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

I spent some time today observing proceedings in Henrico County District Court. (No, I was not a defendant.) I recommend the experience to anyone interested in seeing how the criminal justice system works in real life.

District court is the venue for hearing traffic offenses and misdemeanors. It also hears more serious cases for probable cause to be sent to circuit court.

I sat in on two different courtrooms. The atmosphere in both was somewhat reminiscent of that depicted in the old TV series, Night Court. The Henrico judges, of course, were not as unorthodox as Judge Harry Anderson in that series nor were there the slapstick and irreverent humor prevalent there. However, there was an informal feeling with lots of friendly interaction among the defense attorneys, prosecutors, police, and judges. The judges were respectful and, sometimes, friendly toward the defendants, while at the same time admonishing them for their misdeeds. Continue reading →

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Posted in Courts and law, Crime, Corrections and Law Enforcement, Virginia Law

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