Category Archives: Political Influence

Redistricting: Let the Lawsuits Begin!

Posted on September 12, 2021 by | 10 comments

Sen. Travis Hackworth (R-Tazewell) Photo crecit: Steve Helber/AP

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

The first draft maps had not been drawn when the first lawsuit challenging Virginia’s redistricting process was filed.

Sen. Travis Hackworth. R-Tazewell, along with several other plaintiffs, is challenging 2020 Virginia legislation that required, for redistricting purposes, prison and jail inmates to be allocated to the population counts of the locality of their last known address, rather than to the localities in which the prisons and jails in which they were incarcerated, as had been the practice in past years. (That legislation was the subject of an earlier BR post.)

Because most prisons are located in rural areas, by shifting their populations to other areas of the state for purposes of the population totals used in redistricting, the lawsuit claims that the change will politically weaken rural areas.

The basis for the suit is unusual. The defendant is the newly constituted Virginia Redistricting Commission. The Commission was established through voter approval of a constitutional amendment approved in a 2020 referendum. The court petition claims that, because the legislation dealing with how the Commission should treat prison populations during its redistricting efforts was passed by the legislature and not approved by voters in the referendum, the legislation is invalid. Continue reading →

10 Comments

Posted in General Assembly, Political Influence, Politics

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Campaign Finance Reform in Virginia – the New Governor Must Lead

Posted on September 4, 2021 by | 21 comments

by James C. Sherlock

I consider campaign finance reform the foremost issue facing representative government in Virginia.

We are one of only a few states with no campaign donations limits at all. We pay for that in legislation enacted and not enacted because of the preferences of huge donors. And in the stink of legal public corruption.

It also drives way up the cost of running and keeps good people from participating.

The new governor will have to lead. Continue reading →

21 Comments

Posted in Elections, Electoral process, Ethics, General Assembly, Governance, Money in politics, Political Influence, Politics, Public corruption, Scandals

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Coming to Virginia – a New State of Emergency?

Posted on August 6, 2021 by | 24 comments

Why is this man smiling?

by James C. Sherlock

The Governor’s 15-month emergency powers expired June 30, and, God, does he miss them.

From The Virginian-Pilot:

“School districts that aren’t requiring masks, including several in Hampton Roads, are running afoul of state law, Gov. Ralph Northam said Thursday.”

OK.

The bigger questions are

  • how long the governor will put up with the lack of emergency powers;
  • when he will start to follow Virginia’s Pandemic Emergency Annex to its Emergency Operations Plan; and
  • is the General Assembly even interested?

Continue reading →

24 Comments

Posted in Budgets, Disaster planning, Finance (government), General Assembly, Governance, Money in politics, Political Influence, Public safety & health, Virginia Law

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Fall Elections Threaten Northam’s Radical Education Team

Posted on May 6, 2021 by | 5 comments

Qarni

by James C. Sherlock

Politics is a contact sport, and the two people in the Northam administration most likely to be blindsided are Secretary of Education Atif Qarni and Superintendent of Public Instruction James Lane.

I say blindsided — they won’t see it coming — because the hits will come from their own team. This isn’t about whether a reader thinks they have earned it or not. It is about politics.

Lane

I think it likely that Glenn Youngkin will be the Republican nominee for Governor and Jason Miyares the Republican pick for Attorney General.

If so, three things are likely to happen. First, both races will be competitive. Second, voters will turn out in droves in protest of the education policies of the Northam administration. Finally, If Terry McAuliffe, the presumptive Democratic nominee, feels threatened, he will flush Qarni and Lane one way or the other.

They should freshen up their resumes. Continue reading →

5 Comments

Posted in Culture wars, Education - Early Childhood, Education (K-12), General Assembly, Governance, Political Influence, Politics

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Union Bosses Bullied the CDC to Keep Schools Closed

Posted on May 4, 2021 by | 17 comments

by Kerry Dougherty

Anyone remember when Donald Trump was pummeled for putting pressure on the CDC over COVID?

Wonder what those critics are saying now that we learn union bosses from the American Federation of Teachers essentially wrote public policy for the agency that kept children locked out of schools last winter.

It’s an astonishing, but not an altogether surprising development, given the outsized influence teachers and other trade unions have in the Biden administration.

In a Saturday front-page story headlined, “Powerful Teachers Union Influenced CDC On School Reopenings, Emails Show,” The New York Post reported that it was muscle from the militant AFT, rather than science, that slowed school reopening in many places. Continue reading →

17 Comments

Posted in Political Influence, Public safety & health

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The Real Nursing Home Scandal in Virginia

Posted on March 23, 2021 by | 4 comments

Canterbury Rehabilitation and Healthcare Richmond

by James C. Sherlock

Mike Martz has written three excellent columns that have appeared in the Richmond Times Dispatch starting March 19.  Headline of one: “Virginia tries to move ahead of national ‘reform agenda’ for nursing homes.”

The gist of it was that a couple of national nursing home industry organizations have taken advantage of the public consciousness of the COVID tragedies to produce a “reform agenda” centered around significantly higher Medicaid payments.

Unreported so far is that they also want weaker inspections. More about that below.

We all applaud any attempt to “improve operating standards for nursing homes, initiatives to boost the facilities’ workforce, and efforts to give residents more privacy and protect them from poor-performing nursing homes” as Martz wrote. Who could oppose that?

The financials of nursing homes lead me to agree that higher Medicaid payments will be required to accomplish those goals. But the higher payments need to be accompanied by better oversight to make sure that the money brings the desired outcomes.  Continue reading →

4 Comments

Posted in Consumer protection, General Assembly, Governance, Government Oversight, Health Care, Long Term Care and Nursing Homes, Political Influence, Regulation

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Virginians’ Money and Our Tax-Exempt “Public Charity” Healthcare Monopolies

Posted on March 21, 2021 by | 18 comments

The Business of Healthcare

by James C. Sherlock

A generally accepted rule of thumb for the minimum profitability required for a hospital to maintain operations and fund its future is 3%.

Virginia’s community hospitals as a group in 2019 had an operating margin of 10%. Most of them are filed with federal and state governments as not-for-profit public charities and are untaxed at any level of government.

I yesterday wrote a  column that disclosed 34% increases in the 2019 profitability of Virginia hospitals that were generated by taxpayer funds sent directly to the hospitals through Medicaid expansion and increases in Medicaid payments passed by the General Assembly in 2018.

There were several good reasons for Medicaid expansion. Better access for the poor. Financial stability for rural hospitals. I was for Medicaid expansion myself, and Republican votes put it over the top. Continue reading →

18 Comments

Posted in Charity and philanthropy, Courts and law, Finance (government), General Assembly, Health Care, Political Influence, Taxes

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How “Independent” Are the VMI-Racism Investigators?

Posted on March 8, 2021 by | 21 comments

by James A. Bacon

On Oct. 18, Governor Ralph Northam and senior Democratic members of the General Assembly wrote a letter to the Virginia Military Institute Board of Visitors expressing deep concerns about “appalling” allegations of racism at the military academy. The letter proceeded to repeat charges previously aired in the Roanoke Times and Washington Post and announced plans to hire an “independent” and “non-partisan” investigator to conduct a review and report preliminary results by year-end.

By Nov. 1, the administration had mobilized to issue a Request for Proposal. That responsibility was nominally given to the state agency in charge of overseeing Virginia’s higher education system, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV). But senior officials of the Northam administration were intimately involved in drafting and editing the politically sensitive document, which detailed exactly what the winning vendor was supposed to investigate and how to do it.

On Nov. 17, the administration announced an intent to award the contract to the Washington, D.C., office of a national law firm, Barnes & Thornburg. A competing vendor, CAI, filed a protest, which delayed granting of the final award, and then filed a lawsuit. Documents revealed in the lawsuit exhibits and Freedom of Information Act requests call into into question how “independent” and “non-partisan” the inquiry is. Indeed, a close look at the administration’s objectives and actions suggests that the investigation findings — an “interim” report is due to be released this week — are to some degree fore-ordained. Continue reading →

21 Comments

Posted in Political Influence, Race and race relations

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Certificate of Public Need’s Hall of Mirrors

Posted on February 24, 2021 by | 17 comments

by James C. Sherlock

Versailles Hall of Mirrors

In Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors, everything is reflected hundreds of times.

The mirrors were also a commercial. They represented an effort of Louis XIV to establish for France monopolies on the production of luxury goods.

Virginia’s Certificate of Public Need (COPN) law and regulations represent a similar structure.

Everything in the process reflects back on itself. Those reflections both reinforce the structure and cement monopolies. Though it represents the intrigue of Versailles, COPN lacks beauty and grace. But, in another similarity, neither Louis nor Virginia’s General Assembly tried to represent the interests of the people in these enterprises.

This essay will help explain how COPN works. It would be shorter if the tentacles of COPN were not so completely enveloping and self-reinforcing. This is in its entirety both legal and a scandal, as with much else in Virginia politics.

Two recent COPN decisions affect my home area of South Hampton Roads. Those cases pointed to the systemic roadblocks to successfully challenging Sentara Healthcare’s dominance here which will never be surmounted while COPN stands as is. Continue reading →

17 Comments

Posted in Antitrust, Courts and law, Efficiency in government, Ethics, General Assembly, Government Oversight, Health Care, Political Influence, Regulation

Buy Bacon’s Book

Posted on February 21, 2021 by | 14 comments

By Peter Galuszka

This is a shameless advertisement. Jim has written an excellent book and you should buy it and review it.

While some of Jim’s focus is at odds with a similar book I wrote eight years ago, “Maverick Miner” is a really well put together effort at research and writing.

In my reporting, I asked many people, mostly miners, what they thought about E. Morgan Massey. The response: tough on unions but good guy. I heard this over and over. I was told that if rank and file miners had a serious problem, they could call Morgan and he’d come to the mountains to work things out. I heard this a lot and it gives credence to Jim’s book.

You should buy the book, read it, and like it or not, post something on Amazon. Here’s something I did:

“In this book, Jim Bacon, a Richmond journalist, tells a fascinating story about 94-year-old E. Morgan Massey, the former head of coal company that would become highly controversial. Massey paid Bacon to write a private narrative about the Massey family and agreed to let Bacon write his own unabridged account. Taken as a biography and while understanding that this is from Massey’s viewpoint, the result works very well. Massey explains why he hired Donald L. Blankenship, who achieved remarkable notoriety as the boss of Massey Energy, a company spinoff. He ended up in federal prison. The book underestimates the human and environmental cost of coal mining in the Central Appalachians. It also takes Massey’s side in dissecting what caused the April 5, 2010 explosion that killed 29 miners – the worst such U.S. coal disaster in 40 years. Even so, Bacon’s access to internal sources and records is a welcome contribution to understanding a great story.

Peter Galuszka is author of “Thunder on the Mountain: Death At Massey and the Dirty Secrets Behind Big Coal.” (St. Martin’s Press, 2012)

14 Comments

Posted in Business and Economy, Culture wars, Disaster planning, Energy, Environment, Labor & workforce, Money in politics, Political Influence, Politics, Regulation, Unions

What Texas’s Crisis Means for Virginia

Posted on February 21, 2021 by | 208 comments

by Peter Galuszka

The Texas freeze and ensuing energy disaster has clear lessons for Virginia as it sorts out its energy future.

Yet much of the media coverage in Virginia and certainly on Bacon’s Rebellion conveniently leaves out pertinent observations.

The statewide freeze in Texas completely fouled up the entire energy infrastructure as natural gas pipelines and oil wells stopped working, coal at generating plants iced over and wind turbines stopped working.

Making matters much worse, Texas opted not to have power links with other states. Its “free market” system of purchasing power meant utilities skimped on maintenance and adding weather-relative preventive measures such as making sure key generation components were weatherproof.

The result? Scores dead and millions without electricity. Here are more points worth considering in Virginia:

Climate Change is For Real

It is a shame that so much comment in Bacon’s Rebellion is propaganda from people who are or were paid, either directly or indirectly, by the fossil fuel industry. Thus, the blog diminishes the importance of dealing with climate change in a progressive way.  Continue reading →

208 Comments

Posted in Blogs and blog administration, Budgets, Business and Economy, Consumer protection, Culture wars, Disaster planning, Economic development, Energy, Environment, Insurance, Labor & workforce, Land use & development, Money in politics, Political Influence, Politics, Property rights, Public corruption, Public safety & health, Regulation, Science & Technology

The Democratic Coalition’s Conflicts of Interest Cause Much Political Scrambling

Posted on February 17, 2021 by | 17 comments

by James C. Sherlock

It is tough to be a Democratic politician in Richmond or Washington. Now that they govern, they find it one big game of coalition whack-a-mole.

I have written today of the conflicts between the interests of teachers unions and those of parents playing out in the Virginia General Assembly. That vital Democratic suburban women demo is in play.

That is the tip of the iceberg for Democrats. They have assembled a coalition whose interests are fundamentally opposed. Those fissures are only fully exposed when they have unfettered governance, which they have now both in Richmond and Washington.

The only things they seem to agree on are big government, free money and government regulation and control of nearly everything except their own interests.

After that, it gets dicey. Continue reading →

17 Comments

Posted in Culture wars, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), General Assembly, Governance, Media, Money in politics, Political Influence, Race and race relations, Regulation, Unions

Business as Usual in the Virginia Senate – “Dominion Dick” Saslaw Delivers

Posted on February 16, 2021 by | 46 comments

Sen. Dick Saslaw (D)

by James C. Sherlock

Associate Press headline Feb. 15: “Virginia Senate Democrats kill electric rate reform bills.”

Fish gotta swim, Senator Richard L. “Dominion Dick” Saslaw gotta be Senate Majority Leader and Chairman of the Virginia Senate Commerce and Labor Committee.

Saslaw has received nearly a half million dollars in campaign donations from Dominion Energy and its previous CEO, Thomas Farrell. The Chairman literally would be cheap at ten times the price.

From the AP:

“The Senate Commerce and Labor Committee on Monday swiftly killed the last of more than half a dozen bills this session that aimed to reform Virginia’s system of electric utility rate review, which is seen by Wall Street investors as favorable to the utilities and by critics as an example of legislative capture by companies with an outsize influence over the General Assembly.”

Dominion sweeping all before it actually gives some sense of stability to the General Assembly.

Below is a list of campaign donations by Dominion Energy and Tom Farrell to the Senators who voted with Dominion on the closest vote, 8-7 to table Virginia HB1132 Electric utility regulation; initial triennial review, requirements, sponsored by Del. Jay Jones (D). Continue reading →

46 Comments

Posted in Consumer protection, Energy, ethics, General Assembly, Governance, Money in politics, Political Influence, Public corruption, Scandals

Consumer Reports Misleads on Virginia EV Bill

Posted on February 6, 2021 by | 28 comments

Great Seal of Virginia

by James C. Sherlock

Few media outlets are as influential with their readership as Consumer Reports or as active in soliciting direct contact of public officials on issues that management feels are important to that publication’s political values. That is their right, but false statements in support of their positions is a violation of public trust.

I received yesterday afternoon in my email a solicitation for political action in Virginia pushed out by Consumer Reports to all subscribers. It read:

Earlier this week, the Virginia House of Delegates approved an exciting piece of legislation that would allow the state to make it easier for consumers to buy fuel-efficient and electric vehicles at car dealerships in the Commonwealth.

That in turn could help drivers save money on fuel and reduce our air pollution: a win-win no matter how you slice it.

But before the bill can get signed into law, it must pass through the Senate by next week. Can you send a message to your VA Senator now and ask them to vote YES on House Bill 1965?

Continue reading →

28 Comments

Posted in Business and Economy, Consumer protection, Environment, Ethics, General Assembly, Governance, Media, Political Influence, Regulation

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Virginia’s Physicians and Nurses Must Take – Yes, Take – More Influence Over Virginia Health Policy

Posted on February 3, 2021 by | 115 comments

Virginia Health Service Areas and Health Districts

by James C. Sherlock

As I have studied and reported upon Virginia’s struggles in COVID response, many things have come into focus that need to be done better in healthcare. I have reported on a lot of them here and called for changes.

One major, overarching flaw needs attention.  

Virginia’s physicians and nurses do not have sufficient influence over health laws, policy, regulations, Department of Health oversight or health programs.  Physicians and nurses as organized groups largely were neither consulted or listened to in COVID response policy. If you doubt it, ask them. They are beyond frustrated.  

When you needed a COVID vaccination, were you able to get one from your doctor or nurse practitioner? Didn’t think so.

I will recommend here a way to change the balance of influence. It is important to all Virginians that it indeed be altered. Continue reading →

115 Comments

Posted in General Assembly, Governance, Health Care, Money in politics, Not-for-profits, Political Influence

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