Each week during Virginia's General Assembly we get a quick debrief on the action from reporter Michael Pope. This week was as busy one, as this year's session nears its end.
RadioIQ host Luke Church gets an update from reporter Michael Pope.
Interview Highlights
Church: One of the major pieces of legislation to emerge out of the session this year is ethics reform. Or maybe I should say "so-called" ethics reform because critics say it doesn’t do much more than create new loopholes, is that right?
Pope: You could say lawmakers are standing up for ethics reform, the reason for that is because they're trying to make it so that food eaten while standing up is totally legit and you don’t have to report it as a gift, you don’t have to include it on disclosure forms...
But what Senator Adam Ebbin, a Democrat from Alexandria, points out is that this new ethics reform package creates a loophole, which is that there's an exemption for work events. Like when these lawmakers go to the National Conference of State Legislatures, or when Republicans go to the American Legislative Exchange Council.
Church: Michael, this session may be more noteworthy for what’s not happening — increasing the minimum wage, cracking down on predatory lending, implementing gun control, things like that. One reform effort that bit the dust this week was nonpartisan redistricting — essentially appointing a nonpartisan commission to draw the political maps to prevent gerrymandering. What happened there?
Pope: It's important to note that when Democrats were in power they also resisted nonpartisan redistricting, so now Republicans are in control and they're opposing it....
Republicans say that nobody is nonpartisan, so good luck finding nonpartisan people to be on a nonpartisan commission.
Critics of gerrymandering say they're not giving up and they're going to continue this fight.