It is this narrative that Ralph Northam and Mark Herring want Americans to accept about them. On Wednesday, Herring — the Democratic attorney general of Virginia — admitted to attending a party...
· Gov. Ralph Northam will back Del. Jay Jones in his bid for attorney general, Jones’ campaign announced Thursday. Jones, a two-term lawmaker and lawyer from Norfolk, won Northam’s backing over ...
· That those men — Gov. Ralph Northam, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax and Attorney General Mark Herring — remain in office speaks to the uncommon and nebulous …
Ralph Northam. American physician and politician. Ralph Northam is about to make the biggest tactical mistake in Virginia since Cornwallis decided to park his army at Yorktown. With his …
Norfolk and Portsmouth commonwealth’s attorneys Greg Underwood and Stephanie Morales, respectively, announced earlier this year that their offices will not prosecute low-level drug offenses. Morales has apparently persuaded judges in Portsmouth to go along, while in Norfolk, Underwood has had to deal with judges who have refused in some cases to dismiss the charges.
The governor isn’t being helped by fellow Democrats such as U.S. congressman Donald McEachin, who said the governor should call out the National Guard to enforce the law, or Attorney General Mark Herring, who blithely says he expects that the laws will be followed once they’re on the books.
As I said earlier, the last line of defense in the tactic of passive resistance is the citizens. In order for Ralph Northam to secure a conviction for a violation of one of his proposed gun laws in a Second Amendment sanctuary, here’s what would have to happen.
Also, put some teeth in the existing law. If someone violates an order of protection, don’t let them be immediately released on bond after they’ve been arrested. Allow high bonds for domestic-violence offenders who have violated orders of protection or have been arrested for abusing the victim while an order of protection was in place. We know the state can’t be present at every moment to protect these vulnerable individuals from harm, so the state has an obligation to let them protect themselves. The state also has an obligation, however, to ensure that those violating these orders should face real consequences. In addition, counseling needs to be a part of the consequences. It’s not enough to lock them up for a bit and let them stew in their own anger. Rehabilitation has to be a key component of any effort to combat domestic violence.
The vast majority of criminal cases in Virginia are plea-bargained down, because if they all went to trial, the system would grind to a halt.
By focusing his efforts on Virginia’s legal gun owners, Northam is only empowering violent criminals, and he will largely be punishing only young men who may not be making the best choices, but who won’t be served by spending years behind bars for giving a gun to their friend to carry in self-defense on the streets of Petersburg.
Ralph Northam and Mark Herring can’t police every decision by every officer to arrest or not , or by every prosecutor to bring a case or dismiss it, nor can they remove the discretion that must be a part of those jobs.
Rank. Major. Unit. Army Medical Corps. Ralph Shearer Northam (born September 13, 1959) is an American politician and physician serving as the 73rd Governor of Virginia since January 13, 2018. A pediatric neurologist by occupation, he was an officer in the U.S. Army Medical Corps from 1984 to 1992.
Facing widespread calls for his resignation, Northam chose to remain in office but made a public commitment to focus the remainder of his gubernatorial term on addressing Virginia's racial inequities. He and his cabinet then joined with the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus to develop strategies for closing the racial disparity in Virginia's maternal mortality rate, increasing affordable housing and funding for public transportation, supporting minority-owned businesses, removing Confederate monuments from public spaces, removing racist remnants of the Jim Crow era from state lawbooks, rethinking the state's approach to how African American history is taught in public schools, and establishing sensitivity training for state agencies.
Northam led Gillespie among small donors, as well: "5,900 donations under $100 to Gillespie's 2,100.".
Those offers were then declined for undisclosed reasons. Because ICE facilities are not operated by the Virginia government, Northam reasoned that he was unable to unilaterally intervene in the situation – a conclusion that some immigration advocates have disputed. Before the outbreak, Northam had unsuccessfully urged the Trump administration to conduct point prevalence testing at ICE facilities, and soon after the outbreak, Northam joined with Virginia senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine in calling on the Trump administration to intervene at the Farmville facility. In a letter to President Trump, Northam requested that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) dispatch a team to address the situation.
Under the new policy, employees receive eight weeks off at full pay. Earlier in the year, then- Speaker of the House of Delegates Republican Kirk Cox had established a similar policy offering legislative branch employees twelve weeks of paid leave.
In June 2018, six months into Northam's governorship, a class action lawsuit was publicly disclosed, which had been filed the previous October, claiming that Latino teenage detainees at the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center had been physically abused by staff members there. Most of the plaintiffs were being held at the facility on immigration charges. The abuse described in the lawsuit was alleged to have occurred from 2015 through 2018. The Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center denied all claims in the lawsuit, while Northam called the allegations "disturbing" and directed state agencies to conduct an investigation.
On March 12, 2020 , Northam declared a state of emergency in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, there were seventeen known cases of the virus in Virginia. On March 13, Northam closed all Virginia schools, and on the fifteenth, he imposed statewide restrictions to allow no more than 100 people at public gatherings. On the seventeenth, he set even stricter limits on public gatherings, allowing no more than ten people together in most areas; grocery and retail stores, pharmacies, medical facilities, manufacturing plants and distribution centers, and transportation hubs were all exempted from the gathering limit.
Part of the reason that Northam survived has to do with the fact that he largely stayed out of the public eye for much of the year and, crucially perhaps, for a large part of the campaign itself:
Northam’s nine months of controversy began, of course, with the seemingly out-of-the-blue discovery of the yearbook page of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam from his final year at the Eastern Virginia Medical School from 1984 which includes, along with pictures of Northam and others, a picture that depicts one person in blackface and another person wearing Ku Klux Klan garb. In his initial response to the news, Governor Northam apologized for the photograph and appeared to admit that he was one of the two people depicted in that photograph, although he did not say which one.
While Mr. Northam’s political action committee raised $1.5 million for Democrats on the ballot, it was a more modest sum than the $7.1 million that Mr. McAuliffe raked in for legislative races four years ago. “What brought people to the polls on Tuesday, it was to vote for Governor Northam’s agenda,” said Jennifer Carroll Foy, ...
Within twenty-four hours after the release of the report, though, Northam held a press conference in which he denied being either of the people in the photo although he did admit to having once darkened his skin in connection with a Michael Jackson impersonation he performed in San Antonio later in 1984.
Mr. Northam bumbled his response, admit ting he was in the picture before saying he was not, then seemed like he might demonstrate Michael Jackson’s moonwalk at a news conference where he acknowledged blackening his face for a dance contest.
While state and national Democrats did speak out against Northam and Fairfax, and to some extent Herring. there was no move to remove them from office and it doesn’t appear likely that such a move will be coming in the future, especially since the state legislature ended its regular session months ago and the grounds for impeaching any of these men under the relevant provision in Virginia’s Constitution appears to be rather weak. Additionally, polling in the Old Dominion has not shown any signs that the public wants action such as impeachment. For example, a Washington Post poll released not long after the scandals broke showed Virginia voters were evenly split on whether or not Governor Northam should resign,
Nine months after what seemed like the end of his political career, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam has mounted a comeback, One week after Virginia Democrats captured both chambers of the state legislature for the first time in decades, many are taking note of what appears to be a political comeback of sorts for Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, ...