Archive Page 2 of 123
In response to Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s letter to Virginia’s public colleges and universities asking them to remove language dealing with sexual orientation from their nondiscrimination policies, David urged the General Assembly and Governor McDonnell to stand up to Cuccinelli’s anti-gay crusade. In his remarks, he noted that there are still options available, including bringing Senate Bill 66 up for debate and a vote:
Richmond – The General Assembly passed legislation Thursday sponsored by Delegate David Englin (D-45) to give the Alexandria City Council the power to improve retirement benefits for its deputy sheriffs, fire marshals, emergency medical technicians, and other public safety workers. House Bill 273 will empower the City of Alexandria to offer all of its public safety workers a pension plan that allows them to retire after 25 years of service, which is the standard across public safety professions.
“To protect public safety, our community needs the tools to recruit and retain the very best public safety professionals,” said Englin. “In Virginia, local governments have only the powers the General Assembly grants to them, so this is a necessary and important bill to give the City of Alexandria the tools to ensure a quality public safety workforce.”
The Virginia Organizing Project held a “Bake Sale for the Budget” in front of the General Assembly Building in Richmond today to highlight the fact that the House budget makes no serious attempt to bring in new revenue to mitigate draconian cuts to public education, health care, and other core services. David stopped by to show his support and appreciation for their efforts.
“I especially appreciate the Virginia Organizing Project’s emphasis on fiscally responsible progressive tax reform as a way to prevent hundreds of millions of dollars of cuts to education and health care,” said David.
Many of the specific ideas proposed by the Virginia Organizing Project, such as eliminating the state sales tax on food and restructing Virginia’s regressive income tax stucture, are elements of David’s Middle Class and Small Business Tax Relief Act, which he continues to advocate.
“This ‘Bake Sale for the Budget’ is a creative way to draw attention to reasonable options that Governor McDonnell and House Republicans refuse even to consider, and I am happy to support this effort,” said David.
The Virginia Organizing Project plans to deliver money raised from the bake sale to Governor McDonnell for the purpose of helping address the $4.2 billion revenue shortfall.
Last week, I voted against the House version of the state budget, which the Republican majority wrote for the first time in many years with absolutely no input from Democratic legislators. The fact that they shut out of the process us Democrats — including the Democrats who sit on the budget-writing Appropriations Committee — is not in itself the reason I opposed the budget. But a budget that incorporated ideas and input from both sides of the aisle might have avoided some of the fatal flaws in the two-year, $75 billion spending plan that every House Republican voted for and every House Democrat voted against on Feb. 25.
In the face of the worst revenue crisis since the Great Depression, cuts in state money to education are inevitable, especially considering how successfully we have protected public education while we cut $7 billion over the past four years. However, rather than making temporary cuts that can be restored when the economy improves, House Republicans seized the opportunity to institute long-term policy changes that will undermine public schools for years to come. For example, in the guise of “flexibility” for school districts, they are lowering quality by allowing larger class sizes — even though we know that small classes produce better outcomes. Rather than merely reduce funds for preschool, early reading intervention, and services for at-risk children, they have lumped these services into a lottery-funded block grant and then changed the distribution formula to literally take money away from poor students and give it to students who aren’t poor. (Our community, which has a high proportion of low-income students, loses millions of dollars under this scheme.) Continue reading ‘Democrats oppose House budget rife with fatal flaws’
Yesterday on the House floor, David spoke out against the anti-Jewish, anti-gay hate group that happened to be targeting the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond on the same day that David was scheduled to invite a rabbi to offer the invocation opening the daily floor session of the House.
The following is the text of David’s remarks:
Mr. Speaker, ladies and gentlemen, every once in a while, I’m reminded that perhaps the world is not as random as it may seem. It so happens that on the very day the Clerk’s office scheduled me to invite a rabbi to deliver the opening prayer, a group of so-called Christians have traveled to Richmond from Kansas, and at this very moment they are picketing the Virginia Holocaust Museum with a message of unvarnished anti-Jewish hatred. Continue reading ‘David speaks out against anti-Jewish, anti-gay hate group’
