Episode 5: How was this such a big year at the Virginia Assembly?

In this episode of Bold Dominion: the Virginia General Assembly has just wrapped up its 2020 session. And plenty of observers have said that this was a historic session.

With new Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate – plus a democratic governor – a raft of new legislation made its way through passage this year.

In this episode: Virginia Mercury reporter Graham Moomaw gives us a recap of the Assembly session. And lawmaker Sally Hudson explains how these decisions really get made – including some of what you don’t see in the news stories or TV coverage.

Read the Transcript:

Nathan Moore  0:00  

This is Bold Dominion, an explainer for state politics in a changing Virginia. I'm Nathan Moore. In this episode of Bold Dominion, the Virginia General Assembly has just wrapped up its 2020 session, and plenty of observers have said this was a historic session.

Graham Moomaw  0:17  

It was really just a flood of legislation, with Democrats taking control and kind of this, this bottleneck of all these progressive policy ideas, sort of breaking through.

Sally Hudson  0:30  

Though you've got Democrats in both the House and Senate, you've got different kinds of Democrats in the chambers. Often, the House version went further faster and the Senate was the one tapping the brakes. 

Graham Moomaw  0:40  

It's a big deal. There's gonna be a lot of change coming to Virginia when all these new laws take effect so people should, should pay attention.

Nathan Moore  0:46  

State lawmaker, Sally Hudson and journalist Graham Moomaw there. With new Democratic majorities in both the House in the Senate, plus a Democratic governor, a raft of new legislation made its way through passage this year. In the waning days of the General Assembly session, they approved bills to raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2023. They finalized a bill to give local governments power to remove Confederate statues if they want to. And lots, lots more. In a few minutes, we'll hear from freshmen lawmaker Sally Hudson -- she represents the Charlottesville area in the Virginia House -- and she's going to explain how these decisions really get made and what you don't see in the news stories or TV coverage. But first we turn to reporter Graham Moomaw for a recap of the Assembly session. He covers state politics for the Virginia Mercury.

Graham Moomaw  1:35  

I've been down there for, I guess, four or five years and, you know, every other session has been under divided government so you kind of learned to tune out, you know, any hearings on the hot button political issues like LGBTQ rights, like workers rights, like immigration, like guns, all that stuff, you just we reporters kind of condition ourselves that there's not gonna be any news on that front because when Republicans are in control the General Assembly and Democrats are in control of the Governor's mansion, there's just not going to be movement there. But there is movement on all those fronts this year.

Nathan Moore  2:06  

I mean, I don't know how much we can focus on any one bill, because there were so many. And I know the simple answer to how this all happened is the Democrats won, they won both Houses. But how, how does this speak to what's happening in Virginia, as a whole? 

Graham Moomaw  2:20  

You know, Democrats had been winning statewide races for the last decade, but for whatever reason, Republicans were still in control of the General Assembly. I think now that with all of these bills, collectively passing you see, you know, state policy sort of reflects that larger trend of Virginia's shift toward becoming a blue state. A lot of these bills that passed, you know, make Virginia an outlier among southern states. No other state has passed, you know, a sweeping LGBTQ non-discrimination bill. Governor Ralph Northam just signed one to ban conversion therapy for minors, no other southern state has done that. And on on gun control, Virginia, certainly an outlier, you know, among southern states there. So I think I think the big, big picture story is the state's laws come July 1, when all these things go into effect are gonna, you know, reflect more broadly what we've seen over the last decade of statewide elections.

Nathan Moore  3:16  

I mean, is the influence of northern Virginia, the growth in population there and other areas that are growing that have large Democratic majorities of the electorate. Are we becoming less 'southern' in certain respects?

Graham Moomaw  3:29  

I mean, there, there are a lot of kind of regional... regional tensions on display down there this year. Republicans from southwest Virginia, you know, they kind of complain that they felt, you know, northern Virginia is now this this powerhouse that can impose its will on the rest of the state. But I think what we saw was, you know, Virginia has been shifting blue for a long time, and that's just due to demographic changes due to northern Virginia, and also just the growth of the suburbs in Richmond in Hampton Roads and that's really where Democrats power now lies. So yeah, I think I think it's kind of a reflection on demographic changes that were already happening that just kind of got supercharged with President Trump coming into office and just a lot of Democratic voters and people who lean Democrat are just being motivated to come out and vote.

Nathan Moore  4:15  

Well, and as you mentioned earlier, you know, it was Republican majorities in at least one of the Houses for nearly a decade, or more than a decade. So there's sort of a lot of stuff stacked up that Democrats have been wanting for a long time. At the same time, you know, having Democratic majorities hasn't turned us into California or something. It's not like there's super, super left agenda.

Graham Moomaw  4:36  

Right. That that was that was kind of one of the big storylines was how far were Democrats willing to go in using their newfound majority power? Um-

Nathan Moore  4:45  

And what's the answer to that?

Graham Moomaw  4:46  

Well, it kind of depends on who you ask. The Senate is definitely a more moderate place than the House. The House has had a lot of new, a lot of turnover, a lot of new people, a lot of younger legislators, you've got, you know, Bernie Sanders supporters in the House and I'm not sure there's any Democrats who are Sanders people in the Senate. So a lot of a lot of the policy discussions came down to were we going to go with a more progressive, bolder change idea that was coming out of the House or with a more incremental change type of bill coming out of the Senate. And minimum wage was a good example of that. A lot of Democrats campaigned on going to $15 an hour, but the Senate, kind of put the brakes on that. And we ended up with a compromise where we're going to $12 an hour by 2023. And then there's this built in process where they can reevaluate and see if they want to keep going up to $15 an hour. On marijuana, that was where they had to decide how far they wanted to go. I think a lot of people would have liked to have just seen, you know, full blown legalization, but instead they chose to go with decriminalization, which is sort of a step toward legalization; that just means that instead of you know, simple possession of marijuana is not going to get you any jail time or a huge fine, it's going to be a $25 ticket, you know, like a- not unlike a speeding ticket. So yeah, I think that dynamic between the House and the Senate kind of did temper, you know, how far things could get pushed in just one session. But we have, you know, Democrats are going to be in control for 2021. So they've got a whole nother year to build on everything that they did this year.

Nathan Moore  6:20  

You know, we went into the session, knowing that Democrats were going to have a pretty robust agenda. What surprised you this year?

Graham Moomaw  6:29  

Geez, that's a good question. I guess I wasn't expecting them to do as much on as many policy fronts as they did. My understanding and talking to a lot of Democrats, you know, campaigning last year was that they were going to have a pretty, you know, controlled year one agenda where they're going to pick a couple big things, but not try to do everything all at once, but they really did. If you just if you just review the number of issues that they made, you know, pretty big changes on they just weren't they were able to accomplish a lot of change in state policy over the course of 60 days. So I think that's- that's really what surprised me the most was just how much was happening so quickly. The thing I keep coming back to is you rewind the year and Democrats were kind of limping out of the last session after they had all these scandals involving blackface and the Lieutenant Governor. And, you know, it looked like the party was, you know, in disorganized and disarray, whatever you want to call it. But, you know, now there is this flood of progressive legislation that's going to the Governor's desk that he's gonna now have the chance to sign. I just I think it's been, you know, a pretty remarkable turnaround from where we were last year to this. We're going to see just a wave of these Democratic victory laps at all these bill signing ceremonies.

Nathan Moore  7:51  

From where you sit, what seems to be the most impactful bills or set of bills that passed?

Graham Moomaw  7:57  

I think the gun the gun bills were obviously a huge one. Democrats have been talking about needing to do something about gun violence for, you know, years and years and years. And I think that's probably going to be one that continues to be a fight, whether that's, you know, through court challenges and people trying to challenge the constitutionality of some of these new laws, particularly the Red Flag law that lets lets authorities temporarily take guns from people who are deemed a threat to themselves. I think just in terms of the sweep of how, how big a change it is, from how things used to be in Virginia, the guns are probably, that's the one that sticks out in my mind, because, you know, we saw kind of this backlash before the session, there are still many parts of the state where, you know, gun cultures and gun rights, it's just ingrained in the way people live. So the fact that Democrats were able to pass some very significant legislation on that front I think, is a pretty big deal.

Nathan Moore  8:56  

You know, we talked a little bit before, I think, about about the structure of the General Assembly House, the citizen legislature only meets for, you know, eight weeks a year in the in the long years. How, how is that structure still working for Virginia?

Graham Moomaw  9:12  

I am hearing a lot of people who are just- the busyness of this session has made people sort of rethink whether doing it in 60 days or 45 days makes sense. There were a lot of committee meetings I was trying to go to where I would show up an hour early and all the seats would be taken up by lobbyists already. And it was it just seemed a lot more hectic than other sessions just because of the the volume of bills being considered and bills being passed. So yeah, I have heard people, you know, raise this question of is it time to rethink whether a part time legislature with a 60 day session makes sense? I've heard a lot of people talk about should we go to 90 days? I don't think there's much appetite for a full time legislature but I do think that you know, this this session has been just so busy and so hectic that people are sort of rethinking whether it makes sense to try to do this many things in such a short timeframe.

Nathan Moore  10:10  

I mean, it gets tricky. We've got a state of more than 8 million people now. And it's pretty, it's pretty complex as far as the demographics and economy and everything else. You know, what are you hearing as far as like how that would even happen?

Graham Moomaw  10:23  

You know, I don't know if that would require a con- I think it may take a constitutional amendment. I don't know how much of that could the legislature could just decide to go longer. You probably saw they went into overtime this year, they had to take a couple extra days just to finish their work. So I think I think it probably would take a constitutional amendment, but I haven't done you know, too much looking in under the hood of how that would actually be changed. But I think that conversation is something we're going to be hearing more about once everybody- once the dust settles and everybody kind of looks back at how things went this year.

Nathan Moore  10:55  

Right. One piece of legislation I do want to talk about is the redistricting.

Graham Moomaw  11:00  

Sure.

Nathan Moore  11:00  

And so for years and years, Virginia districts have been pretty well gerrymandered to favor, one party being elected to a majority over another. So they kind of pack all the votes for Democrats into a smaller number of districts. That's changing. How's it changing?

Graham Moomaw  11:14  

Yeah, I think- I'm glad you brought that up. That's that's another thing that just in terms of long term impact, it's pretty huge. So, they passed a constitutional amendment that would create this separate commission that would handle the redrawing of the General Assembly districts and the congressional districts in 2021, once we get new census data, where the state has to redraw those lines, just to make sure every district has roughly the same amount of people, and how that gets done, and who's in charge of that process is huge. You know, if it's, in the past, it's been just the General Assembly draws the lines. So that allows politicians to sort of make things safe for themselves or their party or just do favors for incumbents to make sure no incumbent, you know, can face a challenge. So this amendment would hand that power to a separate commission it it- first has to go to voters in the fall in a ballot referendum. So if voters give it the green light, this commission will handle the process in 2021. And that, really, the amendment has to pass two years in a row. And last year, it passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. But this year, there was a pretty big internal fight among Democrats over whether this this particular commission concept is an improvement on the status quo or whether it makes things worse. And one big sticking point was the fact that this commission would allow eight lawmakers to sit on it. So it's not purely political professors or third party experts, there will be some elected officials sitting at that table, impacting the decisions about how the lines should be drawn. So a lot of Democrats felt that that just isn't good enough. That's not really an independent commission, particularly Democrats in the House. But enough Democrats felt that it was an improvement over the status quo and I think felt that just getting getting that power away from the General Assembly as a whole was more important than risking blowing this thing up at the last minute over concerns that it wasn't perfect. But you know how those lines are drawn in 2021, that is kind of the underlying issue that affects all other issues. You know, the more competitive districts we have, that just changes the incentives for lawmakers, if someone's coming from a safely Republican or safely Democratic district, their main concern is not voting the wrong way on an issue that's going to get them primaried. But if someone is coming from a, you know, politically split competitive district, their incentive is to tag toward the middle and vote in a way that's going to, you know, get them reelected with the broad swath of their constituents. So, I think that that change and the fact that enough democrats are willing to stick with that to basically give up some of their power, I think is also In a pretty huge deal.

Nathan Moore  14:11  

Graham Moomaw covers state politics for the Virginia Mercury online at virginiamercury.com. You're listening to Bold Dominion: a state politics explainer for a changing Virginia. Visit us online at bolddominion.org. Have a friend who's trying to figure out Virginia state politics? Tell them about this show, and then subscribe in Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever fine podcasts are served up. Bold Dominion is a member of the Virginia Audio Collective online at virginiaaudio.org. Whether you're into the science of society, or Virginia history, or jazz or local news for Charlottesville, we've got something you'll like. More than a dozen podcasts in production right now. That's virginiaaudio.org. So, how do decisions really get made at the General Assembly? What are the dynamics between lawmakers? What do you not see in the news stories or TV coverage? Sally Hudson is a House member representing the Charlottesville area who was just elected last November. And she stopped by our studios for a deep dive, explaining how things went during her first Assembly session. At the start of this podcast, our very first episode, we talked about this kind of like citizen General Assembly, you know, and so there's this complex state with more than 8 million people and we're trying to pack in an entire year's worth of legislation into just a few weeks. Now, now you've gone through it, what do you think?

Sally Hudson  15:33  

Yeah, I stand by that initial perception that it is too much work for too little time. I mean, part of it is that we physically can't be in all of our assigned places at the right time. And so because we've got so little time you end up double booked often like serving on multiple committees. And so they're often frantic games of musical chairs to try to get enough people in their seats at the right times to cast a vote. So for example, the bill about local authority over war memorials. We had to work really hard just to keep enough people in their seats in the initial cities and counties and towns of meeting where it was heard, because they were double booked with an elections committee. The other piece that I think I now understand on the back end that I wouldn't have going in is that, especially as you go down the stretch, and you are dealing with some of the highest stakes pieces of legislation that have to be negotiated for the longest, dealing with that many intense decisions back to back at a breakneck speed in that those closing days, I don't think really brings out the best in a lot of people. I think often, those are exactly the decisions where I wish we could slow down and go back and have a special week on each of them in isolation, so that people could take a break and take a breath and a beat and kind of come back with some space because I think, you know, if you if you imagine being in the most tense possible environment with your coworkers kind of like locked in a cabin together, you know, often often the best thing we can do for this decision making is to step back. 

Nathan Moore  17:02  

Mm hmm. I want to I want to take me through like what when you walk into the Assembly floor, you know, we talked about kind of like this feeling it's like it's a space, it's a place where for hundreds of years lawmakers of Virginia have put together and crafted the bills and legislation that that make our state work. You know, when you when you go to your seat- do you have a seat? That's one your seat that's yours, you push a button to vote. I mean, take me- how does this work?

Sally Hudson  17:23  

So, the it's absolutely the case that the the House Chamber is a really special and reverent place and I feel incredibly fortunate to walk onto that floor every day. At the same time, once you spend eight weeks trapped in that room with 99 of your closest colleagues, you start to settle in and feel like home. Something that I don't think I really appreciated before going through a session is that so much of the most important work of the General Assembly is happening off camera but on the floor. So at all times, we are very cognizant of who's on camera because they're speaking and where the shot lines are. And so if you have work to do, you're trying to be in the chamber but out of the shot. Often, because of all these committee meetings and our meetings with stakeholders, we don't get a lot of time to be in the same room together. And so a lot of times the work of it is happening by people huddled in a corner, trying to stay out of the shot of the person who's talking and actually getting work done on bills. And then you have to hustle back to your seats so that you can be in your chair when you know the person next to you wants to stand up and give a speech, so that they can be surrounded by people who are paying attention to them. So that is the thing that I now will try to convey to citizens as much as possible. What happens on camera is often the people who want to be on the record shaping the narrative of how the discussion happened. That's not always the same as how the conversation actually took place. By the people who made the decision. It's definitely what gets recorded upstairs in the chamber is often very different than what's gets said downstairs in the caucus chamber. I happen to be someone who I would say is not shy about being vocal with my colleagues in caucus, but I'm not super prone to speak on the floor. I think some people are the reverse and some people are kind of a mix. So I would just- if you're following along from afar, I would just be very cognizant that the chamber floor is really where a lot of people are often like recording speeches, they want to be on record when they run for Congress. And not so much the active debate that's- of considering legislation.

Nathan Moore  19:29  

It's funny, it's almost like the the cameras being pointed at it changes up the whole thing to where there's there's a showmanship on one hand, but the real work is still happening off camera, even though there's cameras.

Sally Hudson  19:41  

It's absolutely the case. It's an interesting impact of public transparency. On the one hand, you surface the opportunity to see what happens in the votes on the chamber floor. On the other hand, it does mean that you push the work out of that light. I would still say, at the end of my first session, the real work happens in subcommittee. That's where a group of six or seven people really work over a bill carefully. And that once bills get voted up out of subcommittee, they have a much stronger chance of going to the full committee in the floor mostly because legislators are overwhelmed. If you're considering thousands and hundreds of you know, pieces of legislation, you have to rely on your colleagues who gave it a more careful review than you could in subcommittee. 

Nathan Moore  20:28  

You know, we've talked some- we've talked a few times really about about why you wanted to run why you wanted this position in the first place, going back to early last year, you know, progressive voice in Richmond and so on, how does it compare to the hopes and expectations?

Sally Hudson  20:41  

I would like to say that I think I did right by the campaign that we ran. In particular, I think that one of the huge reasons that I ran is that our community has an appetite for structural reform, to really think about how the way that we write laws influences the laws that we end up writing. And I think in particular, that was often the voice that I was offering was to say, "Hey, hey, hold on. I know this is how it's always been done, but I'm not sure we have to do it like that. And, you know, could we take another day? Could we bring in, you know, a couple other voices and think about this differently?" And that voice I think, really matters. Because as much as I do love the work and as much reverence as I had for the the work that gets done there, I do think there are more folks in the room who are less inclined to question the way the General Assembly works itself.

Nathan Moore  21:41  

Tell me more about what you mean by fewer people interested in talking about how, and the structures?

Sally Hudson  21:49  

Well, I mean, I think is that the pieces are the things we've already talked about before, which is like, you know, what determines who winds up on which committees? What determines the, you know, how long we meats, how much time, we take who has a seat at the table? So for example, one of the things that I was always really strongly advocating for was a stronger voice for consumers at the table, no matter what you're talking about, whether it's housing or health care or energy, the default in Richmond is to have industry advocates represented, but you have to work really hard to get renters and patients and ratepayers and working families in the room and to elevate their interest to be equal, if not above, the industries that are serving them. And that's that's I think, is the perspective that I was often working for, is to make sure that if you're talking about affordable housing bill, you don't just need the realtors in the home builders there. Right? You need the lawyers representing the tenants who are being evicted. And that's still not the the attitude that has taken shape in Richmond. I felt that keenly in working on a lot of the clean energy bills this session. You know, the big act that made its way through, which is a historic step forward for Virginia, was the Virginia clean Economy Act. But at the same time, it's very telling what didn't get put in that bill. The ratepayer protections, by which we mean the protections for the families and small business owners who are out there paying the bills every day, those were all in stand-alone bills, many of which didn't cross the finish line or didn't cross the finish line as strong as they could have. And I think that that's still very telling about the climate of debate in Richmond. All of the industry folks came together and managed to find a compromise. But when you need to cut somebody out of the picture, because you can't get them what they want out of it, it's often still the ratepayers, the consumers, the working families.

Nathan Moore  23:37  

Yeah. It seems like there were a bunch of bills that passed this year that were all steps forward, but not the bigger steps forward that I think a lot of Democrats campaigned on and talked about going into the session. What made things moderate on several fronts- whether it's gun control, whether it's clean economy, whether it's even the- your Confederate monuments bill got some weird provisions slapped in that kind of moderated some?

Sally Hudson  23:59  

So, the biggest moderating force in Richmond right now is the Senate. Democrats have majorities in both the House and the Senate, but the Democratic majority in the House is much more progressive than the Democratic majority in the Senate. And there are a couple reasons for that. Part of it is that senators represent more people. And if you represent a bigger district, you're necessarily going to have probably a more moderate district, because you're going to mix more people of different stripes together and kind of get something that's closer to the middle. So, the most liberal senator would probably fall somewhere pretty in the middle of the pack of the Democratic caucus in Richmond. I mean, if you look at our community here in Charlottesville, I think Senator Deeds and I are a good example. Right? You know, the Charlottesville-Albemarle core is very progressive. And then once you surround us with a lot of, you know, greater Albemarle, and, you know, the further counties where Senator Deeds represents you get a district with what is I think, accurately represented by a more moderate senator. And so that's what you know, we in our community have to deal with with two people who are both doing our best to represent our districts ably. So that's part of it. The other piece is that the Senate is just older. And so for that reason, though, you've got Democrats in both the House and Senate, you've got different kinds of Democrats in the chambers. And so that was often the the daylight between bills that we had in in the House or in the General Assembly this year was that the House version went further faster, and the Senate was the one tapping the brakes.

Nathan Moore  25:27  

What are some of the biggest takeaways, some of the biggest accomplishments of the session?

Sally Hudson  25:30  

Anti-discrimination provisions. We did tremendous work to rollback downright medieval pieces of our state code, whether that's around women's rights, LGBT rights, racial discrimination, income discrimination, whether we're talking about housing or employment or education. We did a lot of really good work on that front. And we took a number of major steps forward for economic rights as well. We now have an option for collective bargaining for local government employees, we raised the minimum wage, I think that we have more work to do on that front. And so as I come away from this General Assembly session, I think that the biggest steps forward were things that we rolled back. I think our biggest charge for the next session is for what we build up, because we have more time and space to do that now before the next General Assembly session. And and that work is just harder to do and takes more time.

Nathan Moore  26:23  

I know the simple answer to how all this happened, you know, Democrats won. But but speaking more broadly about the state of Virginia, how does this session reflect how Virginia is changing?

Sally Hudson  26:36  

I think what we learned from this session is that Virginia is enormously politically diverse. We have communities of all stripes inside of this great Commonwealth and I think as we go careening toward the 2020 elections, and we're going to force ourselves back into the blue box and the red box, we are rightly going to find a lot of frustration because we don't fit so neatly in those boxes. We've got a lot of diversity within both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, and the people who don't feel well represented by either of those parties. And so that's why I can remain being very invested in Democratic reforms that make us a more pluralistic place. Because I feel like Virginia in particular is really poorly served by a "with us or against us" style of governance, that doesn't breathe the full diversity of this place.

Nathan Moore  27:26  

I do want to use that as a segue to talk about your bill, sort of a baby of yours, was this rank choice voting option. Take me through what it is and what happened in Richmond.

Sally Hudson  27:35  

That was really exciting, you know, of all the huge provisions that we took for Virginia, you know, raising the minimum wage and rolling back discrimination, which will make such a huge difference in so many people's lives. If there was one bill that I was really personally thrilled to see get over the line, it was the rank choice voting local option. So that's a bill that would allow Virginia cities and counties to use ranked choice voting in their local elections. That's a movement that is really sweeping the nation at this point, being used in major U.S. cities at the state level in places like Maine. And I think coming off the Democratic primaries, more and more people are becoming keenly aware of why you might want to be able to express your preferences over more than one candidate. Because we, you know, we've been experiencing that in the Democratic primaries here, where you've got three, four, five, six candidates still in the race, and you don't want to pick just one. I'm really excited that Virginia's communities will now be able to be a laboratory for that kind of Democratic reform. I think more broadly speaking, I'm excited for all the things that we did to empower localities to take those handcuffs off in Richmond and start to express their values more at a local level because we are such a diverse Commonwealth.

Nathan Moore  28:40  

So what's next with the General Assembly with- with your own role?

Sally Hudson  28:44  

So, concretely, what's next as we still have one more day left of session, we have to go back and finalize the budget, which will happen on Thursday. We didn't quite squeeze that in before the weekend. And then we will all take a breather for about a month and we will go back for what's called reconvene, which is where the Governor sends down final versions of the bills. So the House and the Senate converge, we send them to the Governor's desk, he can either sign them, or he can say I will sign this with some tweaks, by and large when the Governor sends down bills, they're technical tweaks. So with another month of careful review on what the House and Senate converged on in those fast-paced waning days, you can often identify little wrinkles that you want to tidy up. But sometimes, you know, he will send down substantive things that will help the House and Senate come together where they couldn't see eye to eye, and you know, and then we'll go into the offseason. And that's really the time where I hope to hear from more constituents because the sooner we hear from you about the issues that you want to see brought up in the next session, the better able we are to prepare legislation that addresses them. So if you're listening to this, and you are a resident of the the Charlottesville-Albemarle region, and there's something that you would like us to take on in the 2021 session, May June, July. That is the perfect time to come to me and say, "Hey, I've got an idea." Because with six months of runway time, we can do all of the research and the momentum building we need to take that idea and turn it into a law come January. 

Nathan Moore  30:13  

Sally, thank you so much. 

Sally Hudson  30:14  

Thank you so much for having me. It's always a pleasure.

Nathan Moore  30:18  

Sally Hudson is a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, representing the Charlottesville area. Thanks to her and also to Graham Moomaw of the Virginia Mercury, who spoke to us via Skype. My name is Nathan Moore, and I'm the host of Bold Dominion. Huge thanks this week, as always, to producer Aaryan Balu. Find this show online at bolddominion.org. Go ahead and subscribe, you know you want to. I'll talk with you again in two weeks.