Michael Pope
Welcome to Transition Virginia, the podcast that examines the transition of power from Republican to Democrat. My name is Michael Pope.

Thomas Bowman
And I'm Thomas Bowman. Today on the podcast, we're going to do something a little bit different. We are going to do a cross over episode with Bold Dominion. Please welcome to the show, Bold Dominion Podcast host, Nathan Moore.

Nathan Moore
Hey, Thomas. Hey, Michael.

Thomas Bowman
And we also have Aaryan Balu here, the producer from Bold Dominion, who is listening quietly in the background.

Aaryan Balu
Mostly, yes.

Thomas Bowman
Very good. Well, let's go ahead and get this started. Michael.

Michael Pope
We love your podcast. We've never done a crossover episode before. So tell us, for our listeners, a little bit about the Bold Dominion Podcast.

Nathan Moore
Yeah, I'm kind of excited about this crossover possibility as well. I'm going to reach the thousands and thousands and thousands of listeners that you have at Transition Virginia now and the the sky's the limit.

Thomas Bowman
Dozens of us, literally dozens.

Nathan Moore
Bold Dominion is a podcast that started in January. It's funny, I think you all and I had a similar idea at the same time, which was, we saw the Democratic majorities come into power in Richmond. And so for the first time in many decades, we had a Democratic Governor and Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate here in the state. And so for me, it was a matter of trying to explain what goes on in state politics. I've got a lot of friends who are very political, they'll post stuff on social media about national politics all the time, they'll sometimes local issues as well. But when it comes to understanding state politics, there's just this like kind of barrage of news stories during Legislative Sessions, but it's almost like a Gatling gun. You don't really understand the context for anything very well. And and so I kind of wanted to explain it. And so each week, or rather every other week for each episode, on Bold Dominion, we pose a big overarching question and then find some experts who are journalists, lawmakers, sort of NGO type experts and have them help answer that question. Whether it's about what to do about the looming eviction crisis or how power actually works in the state and sort of like the economic basis of power in the Virginia way or whether it's a something else all together. And so that's what we do. Aaryan came on board a few months ago. He's a student here at UVA and tremendously talented at putting together audio shows.

Aaryan Balu
Thank you. Yeah, basically, I was a student when the show kind of was starting, sank my teeth into it, and every other student who was working on it got a job elsewhere. So it's just me now.

Thomas Bowman
That's great. Well, we had a similar experience. Michael and I, we've known each other for years, and decided that, I guess around the same time as you, that we were missing an opportunity just to capture in a longer form, the conversations and the dialogue going on around the transition of power, generally speaking, and of course, you know, I am a good Democrat and I think about how excited we all were for all of the new progressives who took power in 2017 and 2019. And then I realized that being a Phi Alpha Theta history, Honor Society person, that we needed to be documenting all of these conversations around the transfer of power for posterity. And I called up Michael said, "Hey, have you ever thought about doing a podcast?"

Michael Pope
He talked me into it, you know, documenting the transition of power was a pretty strong sell for me. You know, I'm interested in history and interested in documenting things. And usually when the General Assembly is in Session, I'm down there in Richmond and the committee meetings, talking to the lawmakers, sort of living it. And so it's an opportunity for me to interview guests and talk to them and get their perspective on the transition of power. It's also sort of a working time for me because the questions I asked the lawmakers and the people that we have on the show, I often pull out sound bites and use them on the radio. So it's it's also actually working interviews for me a lot of the times, but anyway, so yeah. Thomas did sell me on this idea and we have had fun with it and people, our fives of listeners seem to like it.

Nathan Moore
Oh, we're down to five now. I was gonna actually say yeah, that you are sort of a professional documenter of what's going on in Richmond. Before this recording session, I really only knew you as one of the Virginia Public Radio reporters who file, and we occasionally air on WTJU, here in Charlottesville. And that that trademark outcue that like "I'm Michael Pope." Oh, yeah. Okay. So, to actually talk to you now, it's kind of cool. So, you want to talk about the Special Session coming up? Why is the General Assembly meeting again here in mid August?

Michael Pope
Mainly the Coronavirus. Also the criminal justice reform movement that's taking the country by storm, which in some ways, is an outgrowth of the pandemic crisis. When the pandemic hit, Virginia's revenues took a huge hit. So that budget that lawmakers passed earlier this year, they've got to throw that in the garbage can. And so one of the first things that happened when the economic crisis hit, was that lawmakers unallotted all the money that they had previously allotted. By the way, this is a word that only was recently created, unallotted.

Nathan Moore
The new lugism of the week.

Michael Pope
Every time I type the word "unallot" into my computer, my computer says, "What the heck is this, this is not a word." This was created, this is a new bit of the lexicon that we've created this year during the pandemic, to unallot. So basically what that means is, it's the new spending. So this is another sort of wrinkle on this. So Democrats just recently took power after 20 years being out of power. So they pass their own budget with new spending priorities. So this is the new liberal progressive spending priorities of the Democrats. That's the list of things that were unallotted. So it's not like all the stuff that the Republicans paid for, when they were in power, the unallotted money, money that's been put on hold, is just the new Democratic priorities. So think about this, you've been out of power for so long, you finally gain power, you pass a budget that has all your priorities, and then immediately, before the money starts flowing, bam, they're all put on hold. So that's what they need to look at, this list of unallotted items, and they need to figure out what they can afford what they can't afford.

Nathan Moore
Michael and Thomas, what's on this list of new spending priorities that are now unallotted?

Thomas Bowman
By unallotting, really what they're doing is they're just pressing pause on all $2.7 billion of new spending. And then they're coming back in these weeks, here, to turn on those lights, if they have the money for it. And they will be leaving lights off, probably until January, if they think they don't have the money for it.

Michael Pope
Yeah, all of the things that have been put on hold is a huge array of various different kinds of things. For example, services for domestic violence victims, mental health reforms. The biggest pot of money, and the thing that's gotten people worked up, is raises for teachers and spending on public education. So if you think about what happened the last time the economy crashed, funding for the schools, which is a major chunk of the state's budget, was cut severely. And so this budget cycle with the Democrats taking power, is the first opportunity to restore funding to the levels they had been before the last economic crisis. So when they left town, before the pandemic hit, earlier this year, Democrats were patting themselves on the back for finally restoring education funding to what it had been for the last economic crisis.

Nathan Moore
Like 2008 we're talking about?

Michael Pope
Yeah, right, exactly, a decade ago. And so now, all of that is in jeopardy, and they're going to need to figure out how much of that they can afford and how much of that they can't afford.

Nathan Moore
What do we think the amount is going to be, like how much they can afford or not afford with all this? I mean, it sounded like the COVID related tax revenues are definitely going to be down, like like substantially down, but not quite as catastrophic as maybe some of the early projections and fears would have suggested.

Thomas Bowman
I would throw out there that in some ways, it's premature to even consider that the final chapter on Virginia's budget woes during the COVID era, because we're pretty sure this is going to come and go in waves, right? And so you're going to have a payroll withholding going up and going down based off whether or not people are working. And the stock market could also take a dive, which puts Virginia's budget back into crisis. And so, in my opinion, just as a strategist who's been actually studying coronavirus policy, there's... you might be able to level the criticism that they're not being ambitious enough in the scope and breadth of social reforms that are going to be needed to get Virginians through this crisis, in the long term. But from their perspective as like, we're here to put out a fire. There's actually a much smaller fire at this moment in time than they expected there to be.

Michael Pope
Nathan, there's another interesting thing that you want to keep in mind when you think about the current budget discussion, which is all these moving pieces. It's not just cutting stuff. It's also adding new stuff, because they're also considering all this criminal justice reform stuff, some of which will cost money. And so they need to figure out if they cut stuff, and then they add new spending, do they need to cut more stuff? For example, one of the issues they're talking about is like having a database of bad cops so they don't get hired at other police agencies. Well, you got to create a database, you got to pay for people to maintain it. One of the things they're talking about is allowing defendants in jury trials being sentenced by a judge rather than jury. Well, that's going to increase, dramatically, your number of jury trials, probably. And so paying for jury trials takes money. How much money does it take? And so it would be one thing if lawmakers were coming just to put together a new budget. That would actually take a day or two. But what they're actually attempting to do is much more complicated, because you're cutting a bunch of stuff from the budget, but then you're also adding new stuff. So it's a constantly moving target in terms of how much money do you need to cut because you're also adding new stuff.

Nathan Moore
Right. Right. What so we have a Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate, House of Delegates and the State Senate. What are they hoping to accomplish with the Special Session this week?

Michael Pope
Well, aside from creating a new budget and seeing how many of their unallotted priorities they can re-allot- Is re-allot a word? Let's add this to the lexicon.

Nathan Moore
It is now. If unallotts a word, re-allot definitely is.

Michael Pope
The real debate and the drama is going to be about criminal justice reform and how much criminal justice reform they're able to do and how much they're not going to be able to do. There is also some drama with COVID relief, you know. One of the things that just barely didn't make it over the finish line, earlier this year, was paid sick days. And we've already seen some drama on this on the Senate side, where Senator Barbara Favola had a bill that would require all employers to offer paid sick days. And she tweaked it a little bit so it only applies to full time employees. Because the reason this actually died, was a concern with the state budget, that if the state required paid sick days, for all of its part time employees, that would actually be really expensive. And so they decided not to do that, it sort of died. Then the pandemic hit, and people said, "You know, paid sick days might actually be a pretty good idea." So they brought it back during the Special Session but the business community came out hard against this thing, in the Chamber of Commerce and all the business groups and the Trucking Association.

Thomas Bowman
Surprise, surprise, right.

Michael Pope
Yeah, surprise. Well, well, not necessarily, but it's possible that advocates could have worked with the business community to see if they might have gotten some purchase, you know? Interestingly, we've seen that strategy work actually pretty well with criminal justice reform. You see the criminal justice reform advocates working with law enforcement to cut deals on things. So, we actually have seen movement on criminal justice reform and policing reform already, but we have not seen that on paid sick days. So the business community came out against this idea, and it died on the Senate side. Now there's still a House version of this. Delegate Elizabeth Guzman, apparently, will have a bill on this. It actually hasn't dropped yet. This is another sort of weird thing on this, is how sort of scattershot and ramshackle this whole thing is. Like, normally what happens in a Special Session is, everything is nailed down and you just come to Richmond for the actual formal vote. This, in this Special Session you've got Elizabeth Guzman is talking about a bill she hasn't even introduced yet. So like that's where we are now, but she's gonna apparently introduce a version of paid sick days on the House side, where it has already passed earlier this year. It passed in a much stronger version that included part time employees. And so I think what's going to happen is we'll see the House move forward on this, it'll get back to the Senate, and who knows what's gonna happen there, you know. There was a rather lopsided vote in the Senate committee that took this up, the vast majority of the members voted against it. I think there were only three members that voted in favor of it. So I would expect to see some more drama on paid sick days during the Special Session.

Nathan Moore
With paid sick leave, you know, I seem to I see this often on in Virginia politics where where the state has definitely turned more blue, right? And so we've got a number of reforms built around different social issues and social causes. And those are all well and good. When it comes to sort of like pro worker legislation, we're still not exactly what I call progressive, even though Democratic majorities are in both Houses.

Michael Pope
Thomas, you want to talk about the Right to Work Law and how it has shaped Virginia labor policies since the 1940s?

Nathan Moore
I would love to hear more about Right to Work Law and how it shaped Virginia, since the late 1940s.

Thomas Bowman
Well, we could do a whole episode, there could be an entirely different podcast on all of that. But quickly, look, Virginia has got a history of anti labor. It goes back to Virginia's slave status, where it believes that you shouldn't have to pay for labor. It believes that labor is an asset, right, to the individual, and you can own it. And the way that modern plantation economy works in 2020, is that you get the Retail Federation coming out, and you get the NFIB coming out and saying, "No, we can't give people benefits, even though we're in the middle of a pandemic because it could overly burden a few employers, who if they're retailer probably going under anyway", right? So, Harry Byrd pioneered this back In the 1920s, when he debuted the model of "fiscally conservative and socially liberal", right? And so what he used were fiscally conservative arguments to say that we don't have the money anymore to help Black people and institute programs that we're actually going to help more Black people, in his opinion, than white people. And so that led to him convincing Governor Tuck, who was a wildly populist Governor who had already supported the New Deal, for example, that when he came to kiss Harry Byrd's ring for an endorsement, he ended up having to publicly go back and un-endorsed the New Deal, right, because it was going to help more People of Color than it was going to help white people, in Senator Byrd's mind. And so what you see now is not a Republican or a Democratic majority, but a conservative business majority, which are the owners, right? And this is the owners arguing amongst themselves as to how many new benefits, how much money they can extend to people that they would rather not pay in the first place.

Aaryan Balu
We saw a very similar thing when either the last episode on landlords and eviction. Seems like a very much... the people deciding what's going on are those who own the land, not the people who are renting.

Thomas Bowman
Yeah. And you see a lot of material and substantive differences in attitude between the House and the Senate. A lot of that's generational, and for all of us, gung ho, liberals, wild eyed liberals, as we've been called in the past, the risk is like you might be able to get it through the House, but you can't get it through the Senate. And so what the risk is for this Session, this is a really long winded way of getting around to Nathan, your original question. So the Senate's doing its fast docket trying to just kind of slip everything out as quickly as it can, in bills that it believes those owners will find acceptable, right? And the House, which was going to do a lot more progressive, hard hitting legislation, has been delayed by this rule change for a week, to slow down the train. So the risk is that they end up killing each other's bills. And I don't think you're not going to have anything come out of this Session, it's just the risk is that this Session is not nearly as productive as you want it to be. If the Senate doesn't go far enough, the House is going to kill that bill. And if the House version goes too far, the Senate is going to kill that bill. So where the rubber meets the road on individual legislation is going to be determined by whether or not there's consensus among the stakeholders.

Michael Pope
And also, if you think about the labor bills that were considered earlier this year after the Democrats took power, there was a consideration to do away with this Right to Work Law in Virginia, which actually limits the ability of unions to exercise power. That actually went nowhere, even though Democrats are in power. And then also, we saw some differences between the House In the Senate. The House wanted to have collective bargaining for state employees. Well, that did not make it through the Senate. And you had Democratic Senators, in the newly empowered majority in the Democratic Senate, pushing back against collective bargaining. So this is one of the dynamics that we've seen emerge since the Democrats took power, is a House that's very liberal, very progressive. They want to move forward on some of this labor agenda, like collective bargaining for state workers. Where you got the Senate Democrats who are probably a little bit more conservative, probably a little bit older, more your sort of traditional model of Democrats. They've been pushing back on a lot of this. So this is another dynamic is that, a lot of times what happens in Richmond is not necessarily Republicans versus Democrats, it's House versus the Senate. And that's what we've seen on this labor issue. It's a real difference in approach between the House and the Senate.

Nathan Moore
And tell me, you know, during the Republican majorities, when the Republicans had majorities in both the House and the Senate, did it play out similarly? Was the House more conservative and far right then the Senate, and was the Senate more tempered? Certainly, now we're seeing, you know, the House and I've talked with Sally Hudson about this, who represents the Charlottesville area, you know, she said, "Look, there's some of us that are very progressive and want to see things move faster and harder." And typically, the Senate says "Well, let's slow that down and put the brakes on a little bit, but we'll give you something." Has that dynamic always been, where the Senate's a tempering force, or or is that just this term?

Thomas Bowman
Well Nathan, the House represents, each House member today represents about I think is like 80,000 constituents, right? So what you have is a pretty parochial House member, when it comes to their district issues. If you compare that with the Senator who's got I think it's 280 or 300,000 individual constituents in that district, yeah, they're going to be pretty homogeneous in places like Northern Virginia, where there are a lot of Senate districts packed in with each other, but if you go out past Charlottesville down toward 81, and Southside, those Senate districts become pretty expansive. And so you wind up having to juggle Republican or Democrat, you have to juggle very diverse constituencies in these places. And, yeah, so what you get is the Senate is always probably going to track toward the middle, no matter who's in charge, just because of the way that Virginia has set up its government. The House has always been prone to regionalism, and has always been prone to demagoguery, in a lot of ways, and also the best member to be in the House is the Speaker, right because the Speaker is all powerful in Virginia, and you want to leverage your power as the Speaker amongst your members. But if you are the Senate, you don't have an equivalent power of Speaker, so you have to build consensus, by definition of your government, governmental system. So it's I think that you can change the generation of the people in charge, but you're not going to change the character of the elected body as a 400 year old institution, just because you get a little bit of new blood.

Michael Pope
Also, it's important to think about how the system actually works. Yes, it's true that the House tends to be more aggressive. The Senate tends to be the sort of moderating force. The federal government was actually intentionally set up to have that model. And there was a famous quote from Thomas Jefferson about the Senate being the cooling saucer, so the House is like the hot liquid, the Senate is the cooling saucer. It's important to note though, that Virginia was not set up that way. It actually evolved that way over a long period of time. You know, the House is 400 years old. The Senate is not 400 years old. It's 200 years old. And so the Senate actually was added, it's almost like as an afterthought, but the way it actually works now, operationally, is that it becomes that moderating force for a couple of reasons. One is House districts are really small and they're elected every two years. Senate districts are very large, and they're elected every four years. So what you see is a lot of times the House members will do what's what they think is popular in their district, and they're constantly in an election cycle, and they're constantly going back to their voters and hearing, "You should do this, and you shouldn't do this. And why haven't you done this yet?" And the Senators, at least the way this system is supposed to work, are able to take a longer term view and take difficult votes and that when would they have to worry about it? They're not going to be elected again, for another three years. You know, if you think about our current Senators, they can, right now, make votes that they don't necessarily have to answer to voters for several years, like three years. And so the way the system probably is supposed to work, is that the House is more aggressive, and the Senate is that moderating force. And yes, that is how things happen when Republicans were in power. The Republican House was always much more aggressive with their conservative agenda, and they were constantly being pulled back by the more moderate Republican Senators.

Thomas Bowman
Yeah, and also, I spoke briefly about the generational impact of, of, you know, the House versus Senate. The Senate also, the Senate has a bunch of old members who've been there a really long time and many of those people are not likely to run for re election. So especially the older and more conservative Democrats have collectively agreed to say "Screw it", we're going to be a brick wall is not the right way to consider it. But there they are going to be the counterweight that swings the pendulum.

Michael Pope
Why don't we take a break now and when we come back, we'll talk about criminal justice reform and what lawmakers hope to accomplish during the Special Session in Richmond.

And we're back on Transition Virginia and Bold Dominion Podcast. We're talking about Special Session, all of the unallotted budget items, the criminal justice reform. Nathan, I want to go to you way out in Charlottesville, which, of course, has seen a lot of drama involving the statues and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. What's the hope out there in Charlottesville of action on criminal justice reform?

Nathan Moore
Well, the folks that advocate for criminal justice reform that I've seen, I mean, it's not a monolithic group, right? And you have some of the radicals that are literally saying abolish the police and you have a lot more people that are in sort of a somewhere on the spectrum of, "Let's reform the police and reallocate or unallocate certain funds and put them toward other uses." And you know, those uses would be more like a unarmed intervention through social service agencies, things like that, you know, getting homeless people into shelters not into jails, dealing with domestic incidents, with, you know, onsite counselors and social workers, not with cops. Things that a lot of the more, you know, sort of good community policing model of officers already talk about, really. You know, there's a lot of police that, you know, I've got a neighbor even just to sort of tell a personal anecdote, who's a police officer at the university, he used to be a city cop, and he says, look, you see a lot of this and he considers it bad policing more than a structural problem. I think, though, that there are also a lot of calls saying like, "You know, there are structural things going on, though, that go deep into the ideology of policing, and yeah, maybe getting some bad apples out is good, but there are some real needs for citizen transparency and accountability as well as how we allocate the funds." So that's just kind of what I've been observing. You know, Charlottesville has not seen what Richmond has with the same nightly protests and a fair amount of property destruction. Here, the demonstrations since the murder of George Floyd have been, at times pretty, you know, hundreds of people occupying a major intersection at Barracks Road and Emmett Street, for example, but but by and large, they haven't been damaging the property, much less people. And so I think, you know, that that's kind of a Charlottesville thing, you know? It tends to be more polite then some other places as sort of a political value. And, you know, sometimes to its detriment, because then things get papered over, that really shouldn't be papered over. But in this case, I think, well, I don't want to get into monuments as much but it is related, right? That Charlottesville and there's a student at Charlottesville High, Zai Bryant, who's a teenager at the time, now she's a UVA student, started a petition to take down the memorials to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, who were never in Charlottesville, don't have roots here, but their statues were put up in the early 20th century, as a way of sort of, you know, showing Black folks what their place was and making these whites only parks as celebration of the Confederacy. And so yes, Zai Bryant started this petition. A couple of other city councilors have been talking about it at the same time. And so yeah, the mid 20 OTTS, the City Council took up the issue and voted to take him down. Well, then it turns out the state came in and a bunch of pro Confederate groups came in and said, "You can't do that. You can't do that." And so you know, we ended up with the Unite The Right rally, which was both tragedy and morass all at the same time, in August 12 2017, when the fallout is still certainly being felt. A lot of other cities interestingly, like Richmond and some of the Hampton Roads cities have already taken down their monuments, found ways to do so. We're still waiting here. As of this recording, you know, Robert E. Lee is still standing up on top of that pedestal on his horse, in the middle of downtown Charlottesville. That'll probably change, but it hasn't yet.

Thomas Bowman
Do you get the sense from all the stories coming out of this Special Session, that the legislature will go far enough?

Nathan Moore
I mean, that's a tricky question to answer because, you know, there's a lot of different people in Charlottesville, Albemarle County with a lot of different opinions. I think, you know, this does tend to be a very liberal town. There are certainly a lot of people who advocate things like paid sick leave and a higher minimum wage and and reforms to policing. But again, it's not monolithic. If you ask an average person in Charlottesville, what their position was on qualified immunity for whether police officers should be able to be sued more easily or not, they probably don't know, honestly. It's sort of getting into the weeds a little bit on that. And I do look forward to our conversation here as we talk about what that means and what is likely to happen. I know the African American residents of Charlottesville, who have, you know, spoken with or read stories about in the news, Charlottesville has this outsider reputation of being a happy place. You go, and you go to the university, and go visit wineries, and there's live music and yeehaw. And for a lot of the longtime residents, a lot of African American families, there's a long history, though, of real systemic racism in this town. Same as across Virginia, but Charlottesville has a very liberal veneer, which makes it a little more complicated. There's a now passed away City Council Member some years ago, Holly Edwards, who, who was great, I mean, she was very much respected by a lot of people in Charlottesville and died a few years ago, but she had a great line. I saw her say one time where here in Charlottesville, now, we've gotten to the point that Charlottesville lets Black kids into schools and Black people are welcome at the cultural events and music events. And Black people are welcome to even live in the neighborhoods next to white folks sometimes, although that's still pretty segregated. But the real economic power, in Charlottesville, those doors remain closed to Black folks, for the most part. And so those pathways to wealth building and power, remain pretty tightly controlled by a fairly small number of people.

Aaryan Balu
Yeah. In terms of when you say how worried one would be about whether the legislature is gonna go far enough, that's always something I'm concerned about, at least, is we'll get something like, I mean, it's it's important to get, you know, monuments removed and those sorts of very important cultural issues, but it's always, you're not sure if they're going to go far enough on the economic and the legislative, the justice side, like removing qualified immunity, and actually moving money away from policing funds, rather than increasing it. And those things, uh, personally, I am not sure if they'll get that done. I certainly hope so, to make this kind of actual sweeping policy changes that affect the lives of so many Black and Brown people in the state.

Michael Pope
You know, we're only a couple of hours really into Special Session but the Senate has already taken very dramatic steps on this. They had a policing reform bill that made it out of a committee that does a lot of what we're talking about here, in terms of reforming policing. And it was done in a way where the Senators who were working on this actually got buy in from the police chiefs, and they got buy in from all of the sheriffs in Virginia and buy in from the state police. And it was done in a way where they negotiated bits and pieces of this so that there was no opposition. So when the bill was presented in the Senate Committee, there were zero people that spoke in opposition to it. And this was done by compromise, a series of compromises that were made before the bill was even presented. So I'll give you a couple of good examples on this. The original version that people were talking about was a ban on chokeholds. You probably heard people talk about this ban on chokeholds, so they negotiated with the police chiefs, who said "Well, you know what, sometimes a chokehold is warranted and there might be a life threatening situation." And so what they ended up doing is not a ban on chokeholds, the band that the version that got out of the Senate actually allows chokeholds in some circumstances. Now, you might say, "Well, that's a compromise. And that's a bad idea. And that doesn't achieve all the things that we want to." But lawmaking is, people compare it to sausage making for this reason, because you're not really going to get anything unless you compromise. And so that's the compromise that they made in the Senate Committee. Another had to do with search warrants at night. So the Breonna Taylor case has raised all these issues about no knock warrants, and also whether or not it's a good idea to serve a search warrant at night. So the original version of the bill actually put a new hurdle on getting a search warrant to be executed at night. So it said you had to go to a judge to get the search warrant executed at night, you couldn't get it from your just your local magistrate, you had to sort of, you know, bother a judge at 3am and get the judge to sign off on the search warrant at night. And so what happened, so in the negotiation process, you have a lot of these rural law enforcement agencies that say "Hey, you know, our our Circuit Court out here, actually covers several different counties and judges are scattershot, the judge might actually be two counties away, we don't really have all that many of them. So there might be examples out in rural Southwest Virginia, where a judge might not be available at 3am, under any circumstance," So they actually compromised and the version that got out of the Senate Committee says, "Well, you know, what, you need a judge for that search warrant at night, unless a judge is not available and you document that the judge is not available, then you can get your search warrant." So that's a compromise. Also military equipment. So we've seen a lot of discussion about police officers using military equipment, like tanks and assault weapons and ammunition and all kinds of things that you see police agencies use military equipment, and this has raised a lot of ire in people. And so the original version of the Senate Bill said "An outright ban, the your local police agencies in Virginia cannot get military equipment from the Pentagon through this thing called the 1033 program," This is how they, a lot of police agencies, get all this stuff like am wraps and stuff like that. So the original Senate version, was just an outright ban of military equipment of the 1033 program. So they negotiated with the sheriff's office that says the sheriff's you know, the sheriff's, they want some of this military equipment like filing cabinets, laptop computers, you know, stuff that you actually wouldn't even think of as military equipment, but is available through the 1033 program. One thing that was kind of a sticking point is camouflage uniforms. So the the advocates who were in favor of policing reform yielded on this issue. And so now, on to the version that got out of the Senate, your local police agency would be able to get camouflage uniforms from the military. But some of this ammunition might be banned or some of these other sort of weapons might not be available. These mine resistant vehicles, you know, you would not be able to get them and there are police agencies in Virginia that have mine resistant vehicles I got through this temporary free program, so that would be banned under this. So this is sausage making and there are a series of compromises that have been made along the way. However, the important part is it got out of the Senate Committee. So you know, we're only really a few hours into the Special Session and they've already achieved movement on a lot of this stuff, like banning no knock warrants. And they got the police chiefs to sign off on on a lot of this stuff by giving them what they want on decertification. So it's actually really hard to decertify, a police officer in Virginia because the way the system is set up, they can game the system. So if you're an officer who is facing a decertification procedure, you can actually resign while the procedure is going on and it terminates the proceeding. And then you can go to another department and get hired and they don't know that you had a termination proceeding and they can't get that documentation because the way the system is set up. So the police agencies actually have been pushing really hard for new decertification procedures, which is in the bill. So what the approach that they've taken on the Senate side is to put all this stuff in an omnibus bill. And you can get the police agencies to swallow the ban on no knock warrants, which they don't like, but, you also give them what they wanted on the decertification. That's the approach they've taken on the Senate. The House, keep in mind, they haven't done anything yet, because they're still arguing about their procedure, when they get around to doing stuff, they're taking a different approach, which is, each one of these things is going to be an individual bill. And so I think what you're going to see there is the police agencies are actually going to push back on some of the stuff that's in the omnibus version of the Senate Bill. So I guess we'll end up saying which strategy is more successful.

Nathan Moore
Yeah, that'll be an interesting thing to see for sure. I, you know, you mentioned a couple things that already are not in the Senate omnibus bill as far as compromises and loopholes and different things that are that are sort of tempering some of the reforms. One of the big ones that's been discussed in the press a bit, is qualified immunity and how that's not in that bill to change what that means. What does qualified immunity mean? And why is the Senate not including that one in their in their bill yet?

Michael Pope
So qualified immunity is a judicial doctrine that makes it really difficult for you to sue a police officer in his or her individual capacity. It's a way to challenge authority when authority has done wrong things. And so there are lots of Defense Attorneys that wants to either get rid of qualified immunity or soften it up or I guess unqualify it, if you think about unallotment, unqualify? So in any event, the I we've seen movement on the House side, or at least we've seen House members who are interested in doing this. I don't think they've actually dropped any bills on this yet. But you're right that qualified immunity is not in the Senate version. And you know, my gut feeling is that they felt like there would be so much resistance to it, that they wouldn't be able to accomplish their other things. So again, going back to their overall strategy with the omnibus bill, I think their strategy was, if pushing back on qualified immunity is in our Policing Reform Bill, it won't pass. And we want this to pass. So I think their strategy is to just keep the powder dry on qualified immunity for now, maybe come back to it later. But I think, just my gut feeling is, they were doing the headcount and the votes weren't there for it.

Thomas Bowman
Yeah. And to add to Michael, a lot of the legislature feels that qualified immunity and the problems that we are having with it, it's a symptom of underlying issues like the cops are not trained well enough, or long enough. The cops are, they are overburdened and all of the things that society asked them to do and how little they get paid. So from that perspective, you know it it's like okay, well you're you're creating more hurdles to a job that's already not worth it from the police perspective. And then from a what we learned in our last published episode of Transition Virginia, from Sarah Taylor, is that, localities use qualified immunity all the time. They use them, in case their garbage collector runs over your mailbox or their fireman knocks out your window trying to get into your burning house, right? So, qualified immunity is not, as a policy, is not, from their perspective, the problem. The problem is who is allowed to be officers in the first place, the conduct of the police officers, and maybe that is reflected by the lack of training relative to other elements of society. And so in my opinion, while qualified immunity is certainly a sexy policy topic, it's probably not the area where we're going to get the most bang for our buck as reformers. We need to, and I think the legislature is taking this track, they're really looking at what are the underlying causes, and that's what they want to change. So they don't have to deal with the hot potato of qualified immunity, which everyone agrees, you know, if you are malicious, you should be prosecuted for it. And so there's a maybe there's going to be an exemption to qualified immunity based off intent or some other kind of narrowly tailored resolve. But the reality is that the legislature is more focused on other elements that go into police reform.

Michael Pope
Another criminal justice reform effort that I think is going to be worth watching during the Special Session is pretextual policing. So if you are pulled over, because the light illuminating your license plate isn't working, and then they asked to search your car, the light bulb that wasn't working was actually a pretext to pulling you over but then they asked to search your car, right? So there's actually a famous case out of Hampton, where a Black man was driving with a parking pass on his rear-view mirror, it was actually a parking pass from Fort Lee. The officer used the parking pass dangling from the rear-view mirror to pull the person over and use that as a pretext to search the car. He was ended up he was arrested. And the lawyer wanted to throw out all the evidence that was gathered in that traffic stop, because of this pretext of pulling someone over because something was dangling from a rear-view mirror, by the way, against the law. So your parking pass that's dangling from your rear view mirror, your graduation tassel, your rosary beads, officers can use that as a pretext to pull you over and ask to search your car. In this Hampton case, the lawyer wanted to throw out all the evidence that was gathered in that traffic stop. And the Virginia Supreme Court ended up ruling on this and saying "Nope, the police officers were, had every right to use that as a pretext to pull you over." So we're going to see some debates during the Special Session to go into the code and pull out some reasons for pulling people over. So you call this a primary offense versus a secondary offense, so if it's a primary offense, they can pull you over because of it. But if it's a secondary offense, they can't pull you over for it, but they could later charge you with it. So having the light bulb illuminate your license plate, oftentimes used to pull over Black people and ask to search their car, that's one of the things they're talking about, removing that as a primary offense. The things dangling from the rear-view mirror. So we've seen advocates create a list of things that they want to pull out of the primary offenses. Republican pushback on this is actually really interesting, because I talked to Senator Obenshain, who's a Republican, who is on the Senate Committee that looks at this sort of stuff, and he says, and this was a really interesting argument that Democrats actually have been adding pretextual policing for years for things like cell phones, or the use of car seats for children, or all manner of things where Democrats want to influence behavior. They have added pretextual policing and that Obenshain, actually pushed back on the use of cellphones as a primary offense, he was opposed to that when they were debating all of this, he lost that argument and Democrats won and now police officers can pull you over because they see you doing something on your phone, that's now a primary offense. That's pretextual policing. So his argument is, if you're going to do this, be consistent about it. And so we actually might see a chain reaction of stuff happening as a result of criminal justice reform, that actually has nothing to do with criminal justice reform at all, but it has really has to do with you know, the use of cell phones would be a good example. And so this debate about pretextual policing is something to watch during the Special Session.

Nathan Moore
Some of the demands and reforms and actions called for by the defund activists, things like actually reducing armed officers, the the notion that if you've got armed officers, you know, they're going to treat every problem as a nail and all they've got is a hammer. And and this idea of replacing policing with public safety, as a mindset and framework to approach this. What I'm hearing is, as far as the reforms in The Assembly right now is a lot of, you know, reforms to particular parts of the code that might rein in certain behaviors of police. But is there anything or any talk more in line with this notion of changing the framework of public safety?

Michael Pope
Yes, I think a lot of that discussion is actually about the mental health issues. So because of the way the mental health system works in America and in Virginia, your first-responders are often police officers, and people and people with mental health problems often get wrapped up in the criminal justice system, which does nobody any good. I mean, it's really a terrible idea to have someone with mental health, being charged with a criminal offense and being in jail. And recently, I've covered a really tragic case up here in Northern Virginia of a woman with very serious mental illness who had a run in with police and then she ended up in the Fairfax County Jail and then the sheriff's deputies out there hit her with a taser and she died because of being hit with a taser. And so I mean, this woman, she was suffering from serious mental illness, she should not have been wrapped up in the criminal justice system, she should not have been in the jail and she also should not have been hit by a taser. So going back to what you're talking about, if the police officers who responded to that incident, maybe have the training and mental health, or if they were able to take her somewhere other than the jail, she might be alive today. And so that's this is some of the stuff that we're debating in the Special Session is training for police officers or mental health response units as opposed to police response units. And of course, like anything, this costs money. And so part of the debate is "Okay, these are all great ideas. We're also trying to slash like millions of dollars out of our budget", So it's a balancing act they're doing this year.

Thomas Bowman
Nathan, the other thing too is they are looking at this Special Session as really closing the arteries, stopping the bleeding. This is not, in the Legislators mind, that the Session for large systemic reforms that take policy research and sussing things out with all the advocates and stakeholders. That's going to come in January. What you're seeing this Special Session are what are the things we can do? What can we nibble around the edges on that relieve the pressure quickly, both economically and also socially? And yeah, the criticism that they're going to open themselves up to is not having gotten far enough at the time when it was needed. But from their perspective and the perspective of a lot of Virginia government policymakers, it's a marathon and not a sprint and give us time to get it right. One thing you're really likely to hear at the end of this Legislative Session is that Virginia will be now the second state to do automatic expungement, Pennsylvania is the first. This is actually really groundbreaking in a lot of ways because arrests stay on your record. You don't have to be convicted, you don't have to go to trial, you don't have nothing, you just know that everyone's gonna know you're arrested. And that's inherently unfair. And so the Legislature is taking a look at that, taking a look at what other, you know, misdemeanor crimes that they can remove from your record. They're doing this also, mind you, at the same time, the Crime Commission is studying what no longer needs to be a felony, right? So they're trying to de-felonize things. So what you're gonna see is a dual effort here between what the Crime Commission is doing, and then what automatic expungement parameters are going to be. And you're going to see, my guess by August of next year, July of next year, I should say, you're going to see maybe, hopefully, the complete package of reform on that. And that's going to be that's going to be huge national news out of Virginia.

Michael Pope
On the issue of expungement, the politics here are actually really interesting and they're still developing. So, the backstory here is that earlier this year, they debated this issue of expungement. In other words, if you have something on your record if you were arrested for marijuana possession 10 years ago, that's on your record right now. And that might imperil you getting a job or finding a place to live. So you would, it's in your interest to have a way to expunge that from your record. And so they did not end up taking action on expungement earlier this year, mainly, because there was a debate about doing it all at once and figuring out a sort of an omnibus approach. But here's where that fell down. Some things are more complicated than others. So like expunging the marijuana possession, that's actually pretty simple and there wasn't a lot of complicating factors there. Where it gets complicated, is expunging a record of that are involved with sex trafficking. So if you have some crime on your record, but as it turns out, you're a victim of sex trafficking and you want to get that expunged, then in order to make that happen, you have to prove that you were a victim of sex trafficking when the crime happened. And all of that actually is really complicated and takes a lot of ins and outs. And they didn't have time to figure all that out during the Session. So what they did was, they said, "Well, let's study it and come back to it next year," You find this a lot, this happened a lot in Richmond. "We'll study it and come back next year." So they ended up taking no action on expungement earlier this year, so they can study it and come back around with an approach that would solve all the issues. Meanwhile, there's this other debate that Thomas was just getting at, with automatic. That's the House approach, what Thomas was just talking about, that's what the House members want. The Senate members don't want that. And once again, there's a House versus Senate. On the Senate side, they want judges to have the discretion on whether or not expungement should take place and they don't like this automatic approach, because they are concerned that there might be like a sex crime, for example, that might end up on the automatic expungement list and they don't want it there, right? So on the Senate side, they actually want the judges to have discretion and they want to push back on this automatic thing, which is the approach that the members of the House have taken. So there's still all these issues that have yet to be resolved on how the expungements work with all of these many crimes and whether or not you want to do them all at once or separate them out. And then also, how does the expungement happen? Is it automatic or do judges have authority to do that? Meanwhile, you've got this study going on, that has yet to be concluded. So actually, I don't think we're going to see any action on expungement during the Special Session, mainly as a process question, this study is still happening. Why do something now when you're still studying it and you could come back around to it next year. So next year, we would see action on this likely, but I'm not convinced that the House model of automatic expungement is necessarily going to win the day. There's certainly going to be a lot of discussion about it. But the expungement issue is very important, but not something we're going to see during the Special Session.

Thomas Bowman
One other thing that's probably not changing is school relationships with school resource officers. There's a lot of push-back in minority communities that the relationship that Black and Brown students have with SRO's is very different from the relationship that white students tend to have with SRO's. And that's true. When it works, it works really well. Fairfax County pushed back hard on removing SRO's from schools. And so the Legislature, by the way, the the new base of power is no longer in Richmond, it's no longer in other areas of the South. It's now in Northern Virginia. Right? So if Fairfax County says "Wait a second, we have great relationships in our school districts with our SRO's. You have other issues here that you need to solve. Don't point the finger at SRO's, right?" So that is probably too heavy of a lift. They've got to handle other issues. So, you're not going to see that, I don't think this year.

Michael Pope
Thomas just mentioned something that's worth talking about, which is almost like a transition of power issue, which is Northern Virginia is the center of power. But it is so fascinating that the Speaker of the House is from Fairfax County. The Senate Majority Leader is from Fairfax County. The House Majority Leader is from Alexandria. It is really interesting. One of the things that happened in the transition of power is beyond parties changing hands is the regional migration of power North to Northern Virginia.

Nathan Moore
Yeah, I saw a nice visualization they did at VPAP, looking at the Chairs of the committees based on what part of the state they're from and how there's really now virtually none from Southwest Virginia, because there's just no Democrats from out there.

Aaryan Balu
I feel like I'm part weirdly part of that sort of generation. My parents came here in the 90s. And I've lived in Northern Virginia for 20 years. And I feel like we're kind of really been seeing it over the last decade have a lot of, I don't know if it's a lot of immigrant families. I know the places I'm in there was a lot of Indians and Korean people. So, there's a lot of that influx I've been noticing at least living living up here.

Nathan Moore
Yeah, it's where the where the people are. Yeah. Thomas and Michael, I want to ask one more time, just to sort of a recap in a minute or so, what's going to happen? Put on your prediction hat. What's going to come out of this Special Session, on on budget on criminal justice reform?

Michael Pope
After 2016, do people still make predictions? Haha, I wasn't really into the prediction game before 2016. Now I know it's like a fatal error. So, I will say, if you look at what's already happened on policing reform immediately right out of the gate, I mean, like the first committee meeting in the Senate, they come up with this gigantic policing reform bill, where it's important to remember, the Senators who were pushing this thing, had already worked out a compromise on choke-holds with the police. They already worked out a compromise with the search warrants with the sheriff's. They already worked out a compromise on military equipment from all these law enforcement agencies. So a lot of the work has already been done in terms of making the compromises, lining up the votes. And so I think what we're going to see play out is how much of that advanced planning is successful, though, was it Mike Tyson who once said, "Everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face", right? So that's everybody's getting punched in the face right now in Richmond. So how much of their plan is successful in their own chamber, but then, of course, they've got to deal with the enemies down the hall. And these days, it's actually the enemy down Broad Street because they're in two separate locations on Broad Street. But coming back to one of our themes here, a lot of what we're going to see is this conflict between the House and the Senate, on their approach, and again, with the budget issues, that they've got a very different approach to how to do a lot of this criminal justice reform stuff. A lot of times, what you find is on the Senate side, they want to change the policy first, and worry about paying for it later. Sentencing reforms really good example of this. The Senators want to change the policy and say, "Well, if you have a jury trial, you can get a judge to give you a sentence," That's the policy change. That actually is probably going to end up costing a lot more money that they're not really concerned about because they also think that in the long run, fewer people will be in jails and so you might actually end up saving money. The House, they want the Crime Commission to come up with the estimate, and they want to nickel and dime this thing. And so this is another conflict that you're going to see between House Democrats and Senate Democrats, is not just the policy changes, but also when do you pay for the policy changes? So that's a rather a morphus prediction, but it would be yes, criminal justice reform will happen, although the extent of it has yet to be worked out because of the House, Senate disagreements, but then also how much money is available? These are all moving targets, because they got to cut $2 billion while they're also adding new stuff. So how all that shakes out, I guess we'll have to listen to Bold Dominion podcast.

Nathan Moore
Oh, thanks for the plug. Thomas, what do you think? What's gonna happen?

Thomas Bowman
Yeah, I think that a lot of people are gonna walk away disappointed from this Session. It's not gonna be the Session everybody hoped it's gonna be. I don't see the House taking kindly to getting stymied for a week. Right? And in a lot of ways you have the Senate Republicans making that happen in conjunction with the House Republicans so that the Senate can get its legislative agenda through, right? So that's a pretty dirty trick in a lot of ways.

Nathan Moore
So just let me jump in just to clarify, the state Republican lawmakers are intentionally slowing things down in the House so that the Senate can move more moderate versions of these bills through, in order to own the framing, right? And then and then that's the that's the start.

Thomas Bowman
Right. And so the risk, of course, is that nobody's happy, everything dies. I don't think it's going to be quite that extreme. I think you're going to get a bunch of mild reforms that do relieve some of the immediate pressure. I think you're probably going to have most of the budget light switches go back on since you do have growth, but the risk is if the bottom drops out of the stock market once again, do we have to come back and change everything again? Or can it wait till January to be determined? So I don't know. Like, is this Session gonna have anything conclusive? Maybe, but honestly, I think probably not.

Michael Pope
This is a crossover episode, so let me turn the tables on you, Nathan and Aaryan, and ask you to put on your prediction hats for the Special Session. What do you think is gonna happen?

Aaryan Balu
I predict that I will be disappointed like Thomas said, I've no doubt I will not be happy with with how little gets done.

Michael Pope
That's usually a great prediction. Anything that happens with the General Assembly, you're likely to be disappointed. Nathan, what about you?

Nathan Moore
Um, yeah, I mean, I think I echo what Thomas said in a lot of ways. I think there's always a lot of big ideas floated at the start of these things. And then, a lot of times they get tempered and watered down. I know, that's how the sausage is made. There's a lot of pieces that go into the sausage, and you don't really want to see it. But at the same time, I definitely have personal concerns that, for example, if nobody is opposing this consensus thing you've built, is it going far enough to protect Virginia residents who have not been kept safe over the years? Is it really ensuring the public safety of people in the Commonwealth? And so yeah, I think like a lot of things, we'll probably end up with a lot of sort of middle of the road stuff here in Virginia. You know, I've been here about 10 years now and as I observe Virginia politics, it seems like the state almost never wants to be the first to do anything. But thankfully, at least since Loving v. Virginia, we're not the last either. So you know, somewhere in the middle of the pack, a bunch of moderate stuff, is what seems likely.

Aaryan Balu
I think we see a lot of the the bipartisanship when you talk about the compromise bill that we're seeing. And what always worries me is that it's it's the places where we have this bipartisanship between mostly the kind of money markets are folks on both sides of the party spectrum, we see that it's usually not great for the more progressive working class side who want to see some actual big real change.

Thomas Bowman
Well, thank you so much for listening to this crossover episode of Transition Virginia which I'm gonna call Bold Transition. Find us on the web at transitionvirginia.com You can reach us by email at TransitionVApodcast@gmail.com. And you can listen to us anywhere you get your podcasts, Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Stitcher, and listen to Transition Virginia and Bold Dominion.