Today was a big day for Senator Henry Marsh. The legislator of twenty years took a rare day off during the Virginia Senate’s 46-day session, to attend President Barack Obama’s second-term inauguration in Washington D.C. For the 79-year-old black civil rights lawyer, attending a black president’s inauguration on Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday is perhaps …
Tag Archives: general assembly
Photography is not a crime.
Near the top of my wish this for next month’s General Assembly session is a law explicitly authorizing citizens to videotape, photograph, and record audio of police officers in the line of duty. In the current issue of Reason, Radley Balko makes a powerful case for why this is important. In theory, this is the …
How will we keep an eye on redistricting?
I’m really worried about how redistricting is going to happen. It strikes me as enormously likely that House Republicans and Senate Democrats will go into their respective huddles, and emerge with new district lines that will be voted on immediately. I fully anticipate that the first time that we see these lines will be when …
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A General Assembly pre-filed tag cloud.
A tag cloud of the 139 bills prefiled for the 2010 General Assembly session thus far: automobile bond bristol budget business calendar car charter children college commendation commerce committee concealed congress constitution constitutional amendment court crime custody death dillon rule disability divorce duffield education election elections electricity employment energy finance fire firearm governor gun handgn …
Shorter sessions and zero pay for Virginia legislators?
Shaun Kenney agrees that our current legislative model isn’t working—as I wrote about recently—but proposes basically the opposite solutions as I: shorter sessions and no pay. It’s sort of the opposite of the free market approach. Shaun also coins the phrase “argumentum ad Jeffersoniam,” which I intend to repeat long and often enough that I …
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The Hamilton scandal tells us it’s time to overhaul the General Assembly.
Delegate Phil Hamilton (R-Newport News) is in a lot of trouble for ethics violations, and rightly so. FOIAd e-mailed records show that Hamilton had Old Dominion University hire him as a consultant, using funding he’d allocated from the state budget, contingent on the earmark going through. Basically, he put in an earmark for himself, funneling …
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The legislature’s most prolific copatrons.
The more time that I spend mapping the social relationships of legislators via their copatroning habits, the more fascinated that I am by this mechanism of exploring the General Assembly. It really is a powerful tool. (To see one of the ways I’m using it on Richmond Sunlight now, check out HB1721, SB1436, or HB2482, …
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Analysis bears out notions of Republicans in the House and Senate
I crunched the numbers on the collective partisanship of Republican and Democrats in the Virginia House and Senate, and I think that the results are really interesting, insofar as they support the perception that House Republicans are much farther to the right than House Democrats are to the left and that Senate Republicans are closer …
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General Assembly holidays.
Del. Kris Amundson highlights the virtue of the General Assembly being in session on holidays: It’s possible for people to visit. (Though, obviously, it depends on the holiday. Outside of car sales, I’m not sure there’s much happening on President’s Day.) If I’d had the day off, I know I would have gone today.
Sen. Obenshain’s miscarriage criminalization bill.
Sen. Mark Obenshain is trying to criminalize miscarriages. Old-timers in the Virginia political blogosphere may remember when Del. John Cosgrove tried this in 2005. That was hoot. Maura Keaney had him on Nightline within days. Cosgrove had some cock-and-bull story about how the bill didn’t do that at all, accusing bloggers of making it all …
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