Greetings from your State Capital!

We will be ending our 2025 session tomorrow.  Therefore, all legislation will be either before the Governor for his consideration or dead for this year.  As we end our 2025 short session, my focus in this report will be on the overarching theme of this years’ session.

During my tenure in the assembly, there was always an acknowledgement that almost all bills have a constituent behind them. In the past, regardless of the majority party, almost all bills received a hearing before …

Greetings from your state capital.

My update this week will be very brief.  Given where we are in the legislative process, there was truly little “new” legislation considered.  We could only consider Senate bills, most of which were the same as house bills.

The unwillingness of the Democrats to consider amendments that would moderate some of the major policy issues continued.  One of the most egregious was forcing action on the abortion constitutional amendment before we were even given the opportunity to propose floor amendments that would …

Greetings from your State Capitol.

We have reached that stage of our process where we will only begin considering bills that have come over from the senate. That means that our days will be much shorter, given many of these measures have already been heard in house bills or much of any controversy will have already been addressed.

The legislation that we have seen has been the most partisan during my tenure. A higher percentage of votes on legislation has been on party lines than ever before. …

Greetings from your state capitol. It’s been a true joy to have so many local visitors this past week. I always welcome your visits and the opportunity to discuss the bills before us as well as the legislative process. This is your capitol and I encourage you to visit this beautiful and historic site.

The past two weeks have had all measures considered that will be voted on. Unfortunately, I have seen more bills than ever not heard in committee, they have just been killed without …

As we end the second full week of our short session, the focus is on hearing legislation.  Members had until last Friday to introduce bills, so now all measures have entered the mix. All my legislation will have been heard by the end of next week, so I will give a specific update on their status at that time.

I will be engaged in numerous meetings each day as well as our floor session at noon.  My usual schedule has me in my office by 7 …

Greetings from your state Capitol!  It’s been a true joy to have had so many local visitors this week.  I always welcome your visits and the opportunity to discuss the bills before us as well as the legislative process.  This is your Capitol, and I encourage you to visit this beautiful and historic site.

It’s been a slow start, complicated by the water issues in the city of Richmond last week, but we are finally getting up to speed.  Committees and Sub-committees are meeting, but very …

Greetings from your State Capitol. I am again incredibly humbled to represent you in our 2024 General Assembly. Thank you for this high honor.

The 2024 session has concluded, and it has been different from any other I’ve experienced.  The level of partisanship and the lack of consideration of certain issues was unprecedented. The over arching themes have been more gun restrictions, relaxing criminal penalties, increased school mandates, and increased mandates on local governments. Many of these measures will be either amended or vetoed …

February 23, 2024

Greetings from your State Capitol.

As we conclude this week, we have had a far less hectic work schedule, but we have acted on the single most important measure of the session, the House budget.

The $175 billion dollar two year budget introduced by the Governor was drastically changed.  Almost all of the proposed tax cuts were eliminated and replaced with new spending.  While some of the increased spending initiatives proposed by the Governor were maintained, such as increased spending for education, teacher pay raises, …

Greetings from your State Capitol.

This has been a very “interesting” week.  On Monday we saw a ploy by the Democrats to force a vote on an abortion bill that even the patron stated was not the language he wanted considered.  It began with the Rules Committee sending the bill to the floor without allowing the patron to offer amendments or even explain the bill and not allowing any public testimony.  Once on the floor, the patron offered amendments to accurately reflect his intention, to codify …

Greetings from your State Capitol.

We have just ended the last full week for all House bills to be considered and referred to the Senate if approved.  It has been a very different atmosphere this session than any previous that I’ve experienced.  The degree of partisan divide has never been greater.  We have seen many non-controversial bills introduced by Republicans summarily killed with a duplicate Democrat bill then being introduced.  Also, we’ve seen many Republican bills never being put on a committee docket to allow it …