Virginia House of Delegates

Every vote matters.

Now, Joe, you probably remember when I came into the politics in the House of Delegates in 2017, we had a blue wave.

And David Yancey, if you remember, won his seat by one vote.

And that gave us a one vote majority in the House of Delegates, which caused us to stop a lot of these anti-American policies.

Every vote matters.

And as I travel around the district, every time I hear somebody say my vote doesn't matter, I tell them that story.

All right, everybody, first up in the good news from Janine, pronouns she and her, "I live in Virginia and work with an amazing program called The General Assembly to train young people about the lawmaking process and give them leadership skills.

Virginia residents, especially middle school teachers and youth leaders, do you know a civic-minded 13 or 14-year-old? If so, please encourage them to apply for the Page Program for the Virginia House of Delegates.

We need to train our future leaders.

Students who are selected will join a cohort of 32 young people to work for the state legislators in Richmond, Virginia for seven weeks while living at the Omni Hotel from Sunday to Thursday night." Do they have to be 13 or 14 years old? Could you accept 52-year-olds by chance, Janine? "During the day, they're supervised by two staffers, and they get assigned jobs throughout the General Assembly building in the Capitol.

She's talking about Tr- she's talking about Melania Trump, who's her husband, Donald Trump, was an expectant widow, meaning she's glowing, waiting for Trump's death.

It just so happened that this was at the White House Correspondents dinner when an assassin stormed the room with multiple loaded firearms to try and kill not only Trump, but Melania Trump and anybody else he could shoot.

Thank God he didn't get rounds off, but that was the full intention of the assassin.

So Jimmy Kimmel is once again back, and this time he didn't even cry.

And those worldviews do not peacefully coexist.

They just don't.

Um, and I, I remember I, I posted this, and I was still in elected office at the time, and the Speaker of the House of Virginia tried to take me to task over it saying, "This can't be true." And I, and I responded like, "What do you mean it can't be true?" Like, they literally murdered Charlie, and then the left celebrated about it.

And then when I tried to do a memorial resolution for Charlie Kirk in the Virginia General, uh, Assembly, when I tried to just adjourn in the honor and memory of, of Charlie Kirk, that's all it is, and, and typically this happens weekly in the General Assembly.

This is part of Mountaineer Mavericks, West Virginia State Senate, District 13, Morgantown.

Chino Chiarelli, West Virginia House of Delegates member, District 78, Morgantown.

And they're both Republicans, obviously.

Okay.

We're just going to pass a state law and outlaw them.

Why don't you guys be the first ones to do that? Because everybody hates these things.

Well, that was something that I actually saw that a number of my colleagues in the House of Delegates were talking about yesterday in a group chat that we're in.

There is going to be multiple bills addressing flaw cameras at all ranges of regulation, guardrails and banning in the coming legislative session this January.

We have legislators saying – that the State Corporation Commission will need more time to make a decision on the merger with Nextera.

And then we have the Speaker of the House finally weighing in with his views on that merger and where it needs to go, what conditions need to be met before it might take effect.

That's sort of what I've been focusing in on this week.

I was going to say that that's the sort of thing that's been a headline every single week.

And I know we had sort of relatively recent breaking news regarding the letter from the lawmakers where Brandon Jarvis with the Virginia Scope broke that the governor has sent a letter back saying that there won't be a special session called.

I guess, where does it go from here at this point, Dave? What more are you going to be watching for?

Well, one thing that's sort of interesting is there actually is already a special session In effect, the House and Senate have not adjourned the special session for the budget.

They've gone into recess.

And we usually include some policy considerations, or in some cases, policy recommendations, which are meant to be actionable options that legislators could take if they wanted to translate some of the findings into legislation during session.

The commission itself is made up of 12 elected members of the General Assembly, seven members of the House of Delegates, and five members of the Senate.

And do you have a particular remit as a researcher there? What is your beat?

So the full-time staff to the commission are really just two people at the moment.

In this case, we were sent two bills that failed in the previous General Assembly session.

So that's the 2026 session.

There was a House bill and a Senate bill that both dealt with companionship, chatbots, and minors.

And they were sent to us to study because of the fact that they failed.

We want to welcome him back to the program, someone who frequently appeared on NewsRadio WINA during his time of public service, and his public service has multiple layers from city government to state government.

We are honored to have back with us David Toscano, former House Minority Leader in the Commonwealth of Virginia's House of Delegates.

Welcome back, sir.

It's great to be back.

Let's unpack that for a second.

David Toscano is our guest, former state elected delegate.

He was the House minority leader.

He has served for many years.