THE NEWS:

This week, the General Assembly returns to the Capitol to consider a possible deal on the state budget, left undone after the regular session earlier this year.

New census data shows 40% of days are worked from home in Virginia, a trend that has long-lasting consequences for local governments. Experts say there may be a shift toward, "un-transit," and plummeting demand for commercial real estate.

A federal judge in Richmond is giving preliminary approval to a class-action settlement for victims of an online predatory lending scam. The victims were charged more than 600% interest, and they may see a final settlement worth nearly $500 million.

GUEST:

Former House Democratic Leader, David Toscano, talks about his new book, "Bellwether," a tell-all about Virginia politics. He discusses corruption in Virginia's history, former Governor Ralph Northam's blackface scandal, and the troubling origin of, "the Virginia Way."

See more at https://linktr.ee/JacklegMedia.

Sponsored by the Substance Abuse and Recovery Alliance of Va. Learn more at www.saara.org.

Michael Pope

I'm Michael Pope.

Thomas Bowman

I'm Tom, Tommty Train, T-bone Bowman.

Michael Pope

And this is Pod Virginia, your weekly dose of the latest tell-all memoirs in Virginia politics.

Thomas Bowman

A few weeks ago, we were joined by Danica Roem, who joined us to talk about her new book, "Turn The Page," but this week, we're joined by the former Leader of the House Democrats, David Toscano. He's got another new book, where he dishes the dirt about his time in the General Assembly.

Michael Pope

Now I know what you might be thinking. "Wasn't David Toscano just on your show a few months ago, talking about his new book?" And yes, you're right. He joined us back in September to talk about his book, "Fighting Political Gridlock," which was about how states had the power to take on issues where the federal government is failing us. Now he's got another new book. Yes, it's only eight months later, and he's got another new book out.

Thomas Bowman

So this one is called, "Bellwether," and it's all about Virginia. If you get a copy, you will want to start with the index to see if you're in the book, or maybe your boss, or someone you know is in the book. Many listeners to this podcast, Michael, got named checked.

Michael Pope

They totally did. So check out the index, check out the book, check out our podcast. But now let's get to the News. This week, members of the General Assembly will return to the Capitol to consider a possible deal on the budget, which was left undone at the end of the regular session, back in March. Now Chris Wodicka at the Commonwealth Institute says House and Senate leaders seem close to finally hashing out all the details.

Chris Wodicka

Based on what the disagreements were, which is why we had to go into special session to deal with the budget, the big one was around tax policy. And so I think what we'll see is some kind of agreement reached on some of those big questions related to tax policy.

Michael Pope

So it looks like the Governor will not get his campaign promise on doubling the standard deduction. Although the deal on the table is pretty close to doubling the standard deduction. It increases it from 4500 to 8000 for individuals, and from 9000 to 16,000 for joint filers. Stephen Farnsworth at the University of Mary Washington says a governor's first budget is particularly important.

Stephen Farnsworth

If a governor is able to get a lot of what he wants in the budget, that will create an environment where maybe he will be more successful. If a governor gets, basically, rolled by the opposition party, or by the legislature, that's a sign that perhaps the governor isn't quite ready for primetime.

Michael Pope

So the Governor didn't get rolled, but he didn't get everything he wants either. The deal outlined last week by House and Senate leaders, has the Governor losing on some key points. He will not get any change to the gas tax, no gas tax holiday and the increase to the gas tax won't be delayed. But he will get a tax exemption for military pensions, which he was pushing for pretty hard. On some key points, he'll get a partial victory, like the standard deduction I just mentioned, will not be doubled under the deal, but it'll be pretty close. And the gas tax will not be totally repealed, but the deal on the table is that the state part of the gas tax will be repealed, but the local tax will remain in place. So you know, it's a mixed picture, of course. All of this is subject to approval from the General Assembly. And then, Thomas, don't forget, the Governor gets another bite of this apple and he gets, I think, seven days to make amendments to all of that. So we're not through the woods yet, but the outlines of a possible deal are starting to emerge.

Thomas Bowman

Yeah, hopefully it's not too bad. But Janet Howell in the Washington Post, was confirming that very night that everybody gave something up. So it is a true compromise. And I don't know what that's gonna look like. And to your point, Michael, you know, the Governor says schools are failing. But you know, Republicans didn't want as much money for those schools and for teachers. And I'll be honest, I don't know why you're even talking about a tax break, when we have so many deferred budget needs in the state because we have such an agrarian tax policy, and relatively urban, or urbanizing, level of needs.

Michael Pope

What the Republicans wanted, in terms of doubling the standard deduction, was really, really expensive. It's hard to overstate how expensive that was, $2 billion to double the standard deduction. So by pulling that down just a little bit, so it's not quite doubled, it's close to being doubled, but not quite, you got a lot of money to play with. And so the Senate leaders, actually, ended up taking that money, and doing some pretty interesting things with it. Like, for example, they made the Earned Income Tax Credit fully refundable, which actually helps a lot of low income people. So that's a win for the Senate, that's a win for Virginia. They also took that extra money and gave a 5% raise to teachers, as opposed to the 4% raise. So the deal emerging here is that the tax breaks weren't quite as large as what the Governor and the Republicans wanted. But in so doing, and sort of reducing the top dollar amount of all those tax cuts, they were able to make the Earned Income Tax Credit fully refundable, and give the teachers a 5% raise, plus $1,000 bonus in the first year. So this is one of those compromises where nobody gets everything they want wanted, but everybody kind of seems to win in the end.

Thomas Bowman

At this point in time in our week where we're recording, we don't really know very much about what's in this budget compromise. So we'll have more to say on that in our next episode.

Michael Pope

Moving on to an interesting statistic here, about the number of people still working from home, and the amount of work that is still being done from people's homes and not offices. 40% of days are worked from home in Virginia, according to census data compiled by the Pew Charitable Trusts. That's a trend that does not seem to be letting up anytime soon, and it'll have, likely, long lasting consequences for local governments. Stephanie Stern, at the University of Arizona College of Law says cities and counties need to rethink their longtime focus on transit.

Stephanie Stern

But now with this rapid acceleration to remote work, I think there's going to be a shift in policymaking, and in other areas, to thinking about how we accommodate work from home or un-transit.

Michael Pope

Un-transit is the key word of what she just said there. So as transit and all the focus on transit yields to what she calls, "un-transit," commercial property tax values are plummeting. Lucy Didian, at the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center says that means local governments are seeing a hit to the revenues they used to get from office spaces and all of the workers who used to work in them.

Lucy Didian

They don't really go and buy their lunch, or spend on transportation, etc. and all falls up and translates into fiscal burden for local governments.

Michael Pope

So she also points out, that while the value of commercial real estate might be down, the value of residential real estate has skyrocketed during the pandemic. So local governments are actually raking in huge amounts of money, a huge amount of revenues, from residential property taxes, although, clearly, they are taking a hit on commercial property tax values. So, you know, the, the pandemic and the the influence on land use, is probably not something that a lot of people are focused on. But local governments across Virginia are really going to need to rethink this, in terms of zoning decisions, and you know, where they are going to put future office space. Thomas, nobody wants to build office space anymore, right? Because you've got places like Arlington- doesn't Arlington have like a huge amount of commercial property spaces, specifically, office spaces, that are, essentially, empty right now?

Thomas Bowman

Arlington certainly has the largest glut of office space in the market, but all of Northern Virginia is experiencing that glut as well, as well as other urbanized parts of the Commonwealth. And this predates, of course, COVID, because technology is improving, and more people are working from home, and also, Northern Virginia, especially, but Virginia, generally, is the regional headquarters for a lot of big business and corporations. So yeah, you've got plenty of small mom and pop shops, and retail, of course, but for the most part, people are shopping online. People are working from home because they're in a job that affords them the ability to work from home, especially many of the people who live in the suburbs. Less important is commercial space available. And part of the explanation for that is just we've had really bad zoning laws in Virginia. And we could do a whole episode on how much zoning laws needs to change, where and why and, and what changes those should be. But the reality is, if you go to other countries, you live and you work, and you shop within like six blocks of your house, and all of these little urban nodes are transit hubs. And so you live maybe like a half mile walk from your local metro station, right? And that is how most of Western society lives. In the United States, you've got a mixture of reasons that you might put forward for why we've done zoning the way we've done it in the past, but the reality is, you know, we need more places in United States that might be more reminiscent of, you know, Manhattan, rather than McLean.

Michael Pope

Oh, you just made a lot of heads explode here with that last comment. You know, on the issue of zoning laws that suck. Just last week, McGuireWoods consulting had issued a new report called, "Zoning and Segregation in Virginia," where they talked about how zoning laws were used to sustain racial segregation, and how historically segregated communities have been segregated by wealth and income, which perpetuated a legacy of racial segregation. So, I mean, yeah, the past here on zoning laws is horrible. And the future, it might not be so bright either. So I mean, if you think about the current environment, around zoning, and decisions that are made, in this, sort of, post-pandemic mindset that we're in, you know, people are not going to want to have a lot of commercial zoning, or especially for office space, they're not going to want to zone places for office, because that's sort of out of vogue right now. One would imagine 10 years from now, those decisions on office space, might no longer be relevant, but we will have the infrastructure that has been created in this environment. So I mean, you really have to think about the long term consequences for local government on all of these decisions they're making right now on zoning laws, and also on transit. So you had Stephanie Stern, at the University of Arizona College of Law, she's got this whole theory of, "un-transit," that it's, you know, historically, there has been this focus on transit. And, you know, now in this new environment, local governments are having a different mindset of, "un-transit," and not investing so much in transit. And I think that's something that is, itself, pretty controversial. I think a lot of our listeners right now are thinking to themselves, "Are we really going to not invest in transit? Is that the way that we want to move forward?"

Thomas Bowman

One of the ways transit is going to evolve into the future, Michael, is, you know, these autonomous cars and taxi services like Uber, but take Uber and put an autonomous Tesla or other car there, so there's no driver, and you'll be able to order a car on the app, reduce your own personal carbon footprint, reduce congestion overall, but rather than have mass transit, it's going to be large scale, individual transit.

Michael Pope

Alright, one more story before we go to commercial. A federal judge in Richmond is giving preliminary approval to a class action settlement providing almost $500 million in relief to victims of an online predatory lending scam. Jay Spear at the Virginia Poverty Law Center says online payday lenders were trying to use Indian tribes as a shield to avoid Virginia law capping interest rates at 36% interest. The victims were charged more than 600% interest.

Jay Spear

They were claiming that because it's an Indian tribe making the loan, that they have sovereign immunity and they don't have to follow a Virginia law. But it turns out that the Indian tribes are not actually making the loans and they're just a front for these other companies.

Michael Pope

So this is not the first time this has happened in Virginia. In fact, Andrew Gazoo at the law firm Kelly Gozo has worked on several of these kinds of cases.

Andrew Gazoo

One of the crucial questions in these cases is whether a loan made over the internet is considered on the reservation activity or off the reservation activity.

Michael Pope

So in this latest case, the preliminary settlement comes after years of litigation and the terms of the preliminary settle agreement, victims will get debt cancellation and cash payments. So this keeps happening over and over again, Thomas. You have these shady business people who feel like they can get immunity from Virginia's law that caps interest rates at 36% interest. And all they need to do is say that they're an Indian tribe, and get some Indian tribe to sign up with them, and give the tribe a cut of the deal, and everybody wins, and they perpetuate this fraud. But guess what happens? They keep losing in court time after time after time. This is a scam that never seems to work out the way these shady business people think that it's going to work out. And you know, now they're gonna have to pay $500 million of relief to the victims. So, you know, notes to future scammers, don't try this because it's not going to work.

Thomas Bowman

Yeah, you know, I worked really hard with with Delegate Krizek and before that Senator Scott Surovell as a staffer, on getting rid of these predatory lenders. In the six mile stretch of Route One that we represented at the time with Delegate Krizek along Mount Vernon, there were like 14 title lenders. And that was just ridiculous. Many of them were like, right across the street from each other. And there's a business reason for that. So I'm really glad that we were, finally, able to get rid of those predatory payday loans and title lenders. But yeah, this is a story that's not really unique to Virginia, actually, Michael, in using or hiding behind Indian tribes to perpetuate, otherwise, criminal activity on American citizens. And we do need more case law on this. So I'm glad to hear that they keep losing in court. But this is also going to be a fruitful area for future policy and regulation, where, you know, the, the digital age has changed a lot of things. And most of our code is fairly outdated if you read through it. And many of the policymakers are under resourced, so they don't, necessarily, know how or where to look when it comes to these changes. So this is a really fruitful area to look, as far as policy, investment and time on changing policy goes, Michael.

Michael Pope

A big win for people struggling to make ends meet who were routinely being taken advantage of by these shady predatory lenders, who are now losing in federal court, and closing up all their shops on Route One.

Thomas Bowman

Good riddance. All right, wanna take a break and get to the main event with David Toscano?

Michael Pope

Let's do it. I'm excited to talk to the former leader.

Thomas Bowman

All right. When we come back, we're joined by David Toscano, former Leader of the House Democrats to talk about his new tell-all book, "Bellwether." We'll be right back.

Michael Pope

And we're back on Pod Virginia. We're joined by the former Leader of the Virginia House Democrats, a man who's cranking out books like nobody's business. Last year he had a new book called, "Fighting Political Gridlock," which was about how states have the power to take issues, take action on issues, where the federal government is mired in inaction. This year, he's got another new book. It's a political tell-all from his time in office. The book is called, "Bellwether," and it's just been released by Hamilton Books. Returning to the podcast, a man who sold off his wedding gifts at a yard sale to finance his first campaign for Office, David Toscano. Thanks for joining us.

David Toscano

God, this sounds like wait, wait, don't tell me. Glad to be back with you guys.

Thomas Bowman

Oh, man, you just made Michael's day. Great to have you back, former delegate, Leader Toscano. Let's begin at the end of all places. So in the conclusion of your book, you call for a new Virginia Way, the concept of the Virginia Way is a running theme in your book and you even outline the racist origins of the term. Mr. Leader, why is the term so problematic and how should people start thinking differently about it?

David Toscano

Well, first of all, a lot of people have used this term in recent parlance. I mean, if you take a look at many of the inaugural speeches of governors, State of the Commonwealth Addresses, hell, I must have used this term 20 times on the House floor to talk about how we do things differently in Virginia, according to the Virginia Way, not really knowing that there was a history to the development of the term, that goes back to segregationist times in the 1920s and 30s.

Michael Pope

For our listeners, Mr. Leader, actually, could you put a...explain that a little bit more. So like, how did this term first originate?

David Toscano

Well, as best I can determine, it originated with the editor of a popular newspaper, Richmond, The Richmond Leader. His name was Douglas Southall Freeman and he came up with the idea of the, "Virginia Way," as the way that Virginia did it differently than other states in subjugating African Americans. They did it by consent. And they did it with a velvet glove, white people in Virginia and in Virginia, were able to subjugate Black people with the velvet glove, and not with the iron fist that you would see in the other southern states. Now, of course, this was a myth, because Virginians were not shy about using violence against Blacks who got out of place. But it wasn't myth, it was perpetrated in the intellectual circles in Virginia. And it was directly referred to as the, "Virginia way." Now, it fell out of favor for a while, as you might imagine, but it was taken up more recently to connote something very different. And that is the notion that Virginia was a state that prided itself on civility, and how it conducted its political affairs, moderation, fiscal prudence, things that I think a lot of people embrace as concepts, without really knowing that the term itself had a racist past.

Thomas Bowman

So one of the chapters is, essentially, a history of corruption in Virginia, and it recounts a horror show of misdeeds. There's Phil Hamilton, using his influence over the budget to land a job at Old Dominion University. There's Ron Villanueva defrauding the United States for personal gain. There's Vance Wilkins, making unwelcome sexual advances. And there's, of course, former Governor Bob McDonnell and his gifts scandal. There's Joe Morrissey being Joe. And you conclude by renewing your call for campaign finance reform, which seems to be stalled after all these scandals. So what does it take to create some guardrails? And what do you think those guardrails should be?

David Toscano

Boy, I am very troubled by the fact that the Democrats didn't try to do more when they took over. It's almost like they got used to the notion that now they're going to be the beneficiaries of a large S, and they didn't want to clamp down on it. There are lots of arguments, pro and con, about campaign finance reform. But the notion that somebody can give an unlimited amount to a candidate, and that the candidate can use that money however he or she wishes, I think it's just so shocking. You know, Marcus Simon and I worked on bills that would have prohibited candidates from using campaign funds for other than other purposes, other than campaigns. It didn't go anywhere. It didn't go anywhere when the Democrats were totally in control and I wasn't there. You know, I tried to put in a bill a couple of years ago, that would have limited campaign contributions, even $10,000, didn't go anywhere. And it didn't change when Democrats got it. Now, they, they did say that they wanted to study it, but they're not in the majority anymore. And so where's the impetus? Clearly, the public doesn't like the arrangement, but it's so far down on their list of priorities, that a candidate who runs on campaign finance reform, is not going to win just on the basis of that of that issue. And people have to come to understand that too much money is corrupting the system, and is creating these, you know, these artificial pressures for people to do one thing or the other that really shouldn't be there, and not the basis of how good democracy should operate.

Thomas Bowman

You know, it sounds to me like you're getting at a even more fundamental issue than just campaign finance reform. One of the reasons that we've always allowed the elected officials to spend campaign money on their own, for their own purposes, is because the job of delegate or senator, even, pays so little, that some people, in order to represent their community, need to be able to pocket that money to supplement the meager income, or else they couldn't afford to represent their community. And the obvious answer, at least to me, to that is, okay, well pay elected officials like real like, it's a real job.

David Toscano

Yeah, and that's a really good point. And it's one that it took me a while to understand. You know, I'm a very fortunate guy, that when I came in, I had a good law practice, I could run the law practice when I was in Richmond, not as well as being here in Charlottesville, but I could run it, I made a pretty good income. And I could do things that could fund my access to different events, that maybe other people didn't have the money, enough money to do. And you find that in a lot of places that were representatives were representing poorer communities. And so what appears to be, like let's say they buy a ticket to an event. What appears to be something that would be just for their purpose, actually is for the purpose of them being there to represent their community. So there's got to be some way to compromise to allow some of that to occur, without you going out and buying an Armani suit or something, with your campaign funds.

Thomas Bowman

Leader Toscano, you also have an entire chapter devoted to Ralph Northam's Blackface scandal. And you make a pretty significant charge in that. A faction of the Legislative Black Caucus, allegedly, misled the House Democrats. And you write that a group of younger and newer members, made it seem like the entire Black Caucus was united in their desire to see Northam go. But you say that wasn't really the case. So what was the case?

David Toscano

Well, I don't think it was the case. And we do know, we do know a number of facts. There were several meetings in the Governor's Office on that night of Friday, February 1, I think it was, and different people were in different meetings. And when Northam was originally approach, he took a position that that that was not him in that photograph. That was someone else. And he'd never, you know, he was pushed to acknowledge it. Because it was on his yearbook page. And after this pressure, buy it, from this group of African American legislators, he eventually came to say, "Yeah, okay, I have to- I have to own it." Now, I don't know what would have happened if he had basically stayed with that position that it wasn't him. But they were pushing. And when members of the House Democratic Caucus, got on a phone call late that night, that the issue was whether we were going to call for Northam's resignation. And we were very sensitive to the positions of Legislative Black Caucus, because, you know, this was a very important issue. And our sense was, we were going to back them. And so people were asking, what was happening? What's what was their position? And we were told on the call, their position was that he should resign. Well, that's all it took for us. We adopted a resolution and said he should resign. And then all hell broke loose, because other people, and other entities, started making similar resolutions saying he should resign. The problem was, is there was no vote in the Legislative Black Caucus. And it appears like it was only a couple of people who were making a representation that was not supported by an actual vote. In fact, I'm not even sure that they took a vote later.

Michael Pope

So you're- so on this call, you say the, sort of, unanimity of the legislative Legislative Black Caucus was misrepresented, right? So who was on the call doing that misrepresentation?

David Toscano

You know, it's it's I don't know who was on the call, because we have these calls, and people don't, we don't take a role where people say, you know, this person's here, that person's there. All we know is that there were people on that call, who represented the Black Caucus, and made the statement that the Black Caucus wants him to resign.

Michael Pope

Well, that's what I'm asking, like, who was making that representation?

David Toscano

You know, I don't remember who the person was. I wasn't Leader at the time. So I wasn't inside of it. I had talked to Northam. I was kind of there just like a regular delegate, listening to all this. But based on what people were saying, it seemed to me that we had to vote to have him resign. And, you know, as it turns out, you know, there were a number of members of the Black Caucus didn't want him to resign. But it didn't look like that Friday night. I don't know whether the trajectory of this would have changed. But it could have. And well, I guess we'll never know.

Michael Pope

Well, let's talk about demographics and destiny. You clearly wrote the book, most of the book, before the election of Glenn Youngkin. And much of the book makes the case about changing demographic trends benefiting Democrats. You even mentioned that Mark Warner was the last candidate for Governor to campaign extensively in rural Virginia. But then in the epilogue of the book, you admit the demographics is, not, in fact, destiny, what lessons should we draw from both the changing demographic landscape and the outcome of last year's election?

David Toscano

Well, if you look at how Virginia has changed since 2000, and you project it out into the coming years, you still have to believe that the Democrats have the advantage. And in terms of the control of the state. Now, remember, in 2000, Virginia was 70% white and only 20% Black. By the year 2020, Virginia was 58% white, so things are changing there. But the big change was the percentage of Asians and Hispanics are about 24% that are Asian American of Asian American descent or Hispanic, in 2020. Now, with Youngkin, you had a couple of factors operating to kind of overcome the demographic transition that's occurring in Virginia. One was, people didn't really like Biden that much. And so they just weren't very enthused about voting for another Democrat. Secondly, Terry McAuliffe made some boo boos of his own, particularly the comment about parents not having as many rights as they should have in the school divisions. There were other things that happen to the benefit Youngkin. My view originally was that he had to, basically, draw to an inside straight to use poker parlance. And he did, and he still only won by about 2%. So I think that you had a strong rural vote that over came the advantage of the suburban and urban vote. Now remember, McAuliffe got hundreds of 1000s more votes than Northam got, and I think 600,000 more votes, than he got the first time around. So it wasn't like Democrats didn't come out. It's just you had a pretty big rural surge. And as you see the rural landscape of Virginia continuing to change as that loses population and moves into suburban, and urban areas, that will be again, a tendency for Virginia, to remain blue, or at least strongly purple.

Thomas Bowman

At the end of your book, you also offer some suggestions on how to make things better. So let's end on a positive note, because your suggestions include governor's being reelected and relaxing the Dillon rule. So how do these restriction cause harm? And why should Virginia consider ditching them and moving to another system?

David Toscano

Well, the governor's one is pretty easy, because, and people have criticized the one term governor for a long, long time, Virginia has either one or only one or maybe one out of state that has a one term governor. You like a two term governor for two reasons. One is to hold somebody accountable, or not, for the job that they do, and have them thinking about running for reelection helps hold them accountable. And secondly, a lot of change takes time. People think you can just come to the legislative session and you make change. Well, it doesn't happen that way. If you really want to do the change right, sometimes you got to tweak things. Sometimes it takes a while to mobilize the support for a particular change that you need to have. And I think the Commonwealth would benefit by having a two term permissible for a governor to succeed him or herself in the economic development area, especially because some of these major corporations that you want to woo to the Commonwealth, it takes a long time. I mean, I think Amazon's a pretty good example of how, because Northam succeeded McAuliffe, it helped finish the deal. I don't know what would have happened if a Republican had succeeded McAuliffe. McAuliffe started the whole Amazon deal. I mean, it started with him. I mean, the books talks about him being in the helicopter, finding out that Amazon is going to move their headquarters somewhere, and trying to get the helicopter down so he could go out and fly out to meet Jeff Bezos. So it's a kind of a funny story. And his economic development team did a lot of the spade work. And then Northam came in behind him and was able to build on the team that McAuliffe had assembled to bring the deal to fruition. I don't know that would have happened if a Republican had been elected. And it does suggest that sometimes you want similar people or the same person at the helm, to get you through long term change that needs to be done.

Michael Pope

Well, you have a lot to say about the influence of Clean Virginia and Michael Bills and Sonia Smith, you even point out that Smith contributed $100,000 to Sally Hudson and her effort to unseat you. What do you make of this dynamic between the influence of Dominion Energy versus the influence of Clean Virginia?

David Toscano

Well, you know, my view is that everyone talks about major industries, corporations, controlling politics through money, but they're not the only ones, major individuals do too. And I think you always have to wonder about the motives of any folks who put in that put that kind of money and into elections. The irony is, you know, Michael Bills and Sonia Smith share a lot of my views about about policy, particularly, in terms of the energy field. And, you know, I would hold up my bonafide A's on renewable energy against anybody who's sitting in the House and Senate over the last 20 years. But I didn't like the notion that you had to take a pledge in order to get their campaign money flowing to you. And I rejected the pledge, I told them that, you know, I'm not accepting money from Dominion, but I'm not going to accept it from you, because I don't want to have to take a pledge to do something. It's the basis of me getting a campaign contribution. So I wish they would just abandon it and just give money to people who they support. And that's their right, they should be able to do that. But I think sometimes we're too soon to criticize Dominion, and God knows there's a lot to criticize about that, without criticizing other people who are, shall we say, paying to play within the campaign finance structure?

Thomas Bowman

You know, a lot of people would say, tying a political contribution to signing a pledge, and, and it's more than that, if you took a poll of some of your caucus mates, I'm sure. But was there any effort to maybe forward some concerns on to the AG or the FBI or somebody charged with overseeing this?

David Toscano

Well, there's certainly enough concerns raised and a lot of people wondered about its legality. And I think that's part of the reason why a number of members of the caucus never took the pledge. But it was an interesting dynamic for me, because I was the Leader, right? And I'm supposed to be raising money like crazy to help as many people as I can. So I'm in this weird position of, I mean, what am I going to do, tell people they shouldn't take money from Dominion or shouldn't take money from Bills and Smith? I really couldn't do that. And, you know, about a good proportion of our caucus, at the time I was Leader, was taking the pledge. So it's a weird dynamic. Nobody asked the AG to get involved in it. I'm not quite sure why, maybe there were too many things going on at the time. Remember, this was the election of 2017, where we won back 15 seats. And we almost took the majority. And there was a lot of work to do to get those 15 seats and I guess didn't want to spend the time trying to file some kind of complaint. The Republicans could have done it too. And they didn't do it. So I don't know why never happened. I don't know if it's legal or not. But it's certainly never felt never felt right to me to sign a pledge in order to take money from campaign contributor.

Thomas Bowman

I bet you AG Miyares would be willing to issue that opinion.

David Toscano

Oh, my golly, probably issue without it being asked.

Michael Pope

Mr. Leader, one last question. And this is perhaps a little trivial, but it struck me as interesting about your 1982 race for Congress. Did you really sell your wedding gifts at a yard sale to finance the campaign?

David Toscano

That was part of it. Yeah, I mean, I was pretty young at the time, pretty naive, pretty idealistic. And we had to figure out some way to fund it. So we sold some of our wedding gifts. Don't tell anybody who gave me those wedding gifts. But it was really a different time. You know, and then I became a Democrat and things changed from there.

Michael Pope

All right, well, former Leader of the House Democrats, David Toscano, author of, "Bellwether," where can people find the book?

David Toscano

At all wonderful bookstores. I mean, independents have it. I did the thing with Fountain Books in Richmond, New Dominion Bookstore in Charlottesville, a great independent Barnes and Noble in Charlottesville. Hell, I even saw, "Fighting Gridlock," the other book, up at the Barnes and Noble in New York City. So that's good sign. If you go on the web, Barnes and Noble, or Amazon, or Hamilton Books, purchase it there. Use my name.

Thomas Bowman

We've been joined by the former Leader of the House Democrats who is the author of, "Fighting Political Gridlock," and now, "Bellwether." Thank you for joining us.

David Toscano

Thank you.

Michael Pope

Pod Virginia is a production of Jackleg Media. Our Producer is Aaryan Balu, our Social Media Manager is Emily Cottrell, and our Advertising Sales Manager is David O'Connell.

Thomas Bowman

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Michael Pope

We'll be back next week with another episode of Pod Virginia.