Week 3: Crossover is coming up!

The Senate and the House (mostly?) completed committee work on their own chambers’ bills; just floor votes (a LOT) remain before crossover next week. In fact, both sides are doing a little finagling to get all three constitutional readings in on a few bills before the deadline.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK, Senator Carroll Foy, asking Sen Peake about his latest attempt to repeal the bail reforms made in 2020: The Governor and Attorney General Miyares had a press conference surrounded by law enforcement and they said that crime in Virginia was down 11% and we had one of the lowest recidivism rates in the country…In 2020 we had a criminal justice reform omnibus package…and I would attest that us having one of the lowest recidivism rates and the reason for crime being down is because we got rid of some of these unfair presumptions, a lot of the mandatory minimums, and a lot of the things that people tout as tough on crime, which is actually ineffective, because we are actually improving public safety. 

How environmental bills fared:

• A handful of bills to increase the amount of solar energy being created have passed out of committees. HB2037 allows localities to require solar parking lot canopies in new development; HB2090 encourages multi-family shared solar; SB1040 and HB1883 encourage the generation of rooftop solar to meet Dominion’s RPS.
• A bill from the Commission on Electric Utility Regulation that would create a Clean Energy Technical Assistance Program (a research consortium of the universities) to guide and assist localities in how to create policies to meet clean energy goals seems to have hit a major bump in the road–the Senate version is waiting for a floor vote, but the House cognate has died in subcommittee.
• A bill to require the utility companies to pilot a virtual power plant (where a network of small-scale distributed energy sources like rooftop solar function together as a remotely-controlled and coordinated power plant) passed the Senate; its House cognate is up for a floor vote.
• Bills to increase the target energy storage capacity of utilities passed the Senate and are due for a House vote.

Those newfangled technologies bills:

• House and Senate easily passed bills to expand defamation and slander “words” to include synthetic digital media, such as AI-generated deep fakes.
• A bill creating a civil cause of action for the unauthorized use of someone’s voice or visual likeness passed the House and goes over to the Senate.
• Neither the House Housing and Consumer Protections subcommittee nor the Senate General Laws committee was ready to ban algorithmic pricing tools in real estate transactions (used to fix collusive rental prices).
• The bill to regulate decentralized autonomous organizations (organizations that function like a bank, but are run by computer, using blockchain technology, i.e. crypto co-operatives) passed the House easily and moves on to the Senate.

Oldies but goodies/baddies:

• The bill to complete the raising of Virginia’s minimum wage up to $15 passed the House again this year, as did the bill to include farm workers in minimum wage coverage. Youngkin is expected to veto both once again.
• The bill to go backwards to a rebuttable presumption against bail (guilty until proven innocent) was killed in Senate Courts for the fourth straight year. The House didn’t even bother to docket their cognate.
• The bill to go backwards and return to racially disparate pretext stops (i.e. for the “smell of marijuana,” or an object dangling from a rear view mirror) was killed in the Senate Courts again this year.
• Bills to ensure safe storage of firearms in houses where minors are present passed the Senate and is due for a floor vote in the House. Similarly, the assault weapon ban passed the Senate, and is due for a House floor vote.
• Bills to go back to requiring a photo ID to vote were killed for the fourth straight year in the House Elections subcommittee and the Senate Privileges and Elections committee.