In The News

A little before 2:30 a.m. on Thursday, June 16, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut yielded the floor of the United States Senate after a nearly 15-hour filibuster against gun violence. It was the ninth longest Senate filibuster in U.S. history. Murphy, along with some of his Democratic colleagues, used the time to argue for stricter gun control — specifically, to expand universal background checks to cover gun show and Internet sales, and to prevent people on terrorist watch lis...Continue Reading

A group of 27 lawmakers are correctly urging Congress to vote on the Miners Protection Act before they leave Washington for the summer recess. The proposed legislation would address the impending loss of health and pension benefits for thousands of our coal miners, as well as the looming multi-employer pension crisis facing hundreds of thousands of other working Americans. The Miners Protection Act, if approved by Congress, would specifically protect both the health care and pension benefits for...Continue Reading

Two pieces of legislation before the U.S. Congress deal with firearm safety and research and background checks. U.S. Senator Tim Kaine announced his support for the bills on Thursday, which is National Gun Violence Awareness Day. "I'm proud to support the CDC Research on Firearms safety or Gun Violence Prevention Act and the Fix Gun Checks Act - two commonsense pieces of legislation to reduce gun violence in our communities and ultimately save lives," said Kaine. "Congress cannot be complacent w...Continue Reading

What are the most practical and effective steps we can take to reduce gun violence in the U.S.? originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights. Answer by Tim Kaine, U.S. Senator from Virginia, on Quora: As tragedies in Virginia and across the country have shown, the gun laws in our country have done little to stem senseless gun violence. Congress cannot be complacent when thi...Continue Reading

It was late 2014 that the Hampton Veterans Affairs Medical Center had the worst average wait times of any of the agency's hospitals nationwide. In the three years before that, the hospital saw its workload jump by nearly a third, courtesy of aging Baby Boomer veterans and lots of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines coming home from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since that time, however, the staff at the Hampton VA has worked hard to reduce the logjam, with patient wait times being dr...Continue Reading

Critics in the Senate charge that, of all the foreign forces operating in Syria today, the Russians are on the most solid legal ground. Damascus has invited Russia to make its deployment, whereas neither Congress nor Syria has ever explicitly authorized any American military involvement there. KELLY MCEVERS, HOST: Early this week in Germany, President Obama announced a big increase in U.S. ground forces in Syria, which currently number around 50. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) BARACK OBAMA: I...Continue Reading

Before he was a U.S. Senator, before he was governor or lieutenant gover­nor, and while he was mayor of Rich­mond, Tim Kaine was a lawyer. He has seen and done a lot since en­tering the Senate; he has built a rep­utation as hard-working and thought­ful, a traditional Democrat but not necessarily a knee-jerk liberal. You’ll find his name on many of the short lists of potential running mates for Hillary Clinton, should she win the Democratic presidential nomination. The s...Continue Reading

U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va) is calling on President Obama to follow through on his plan to re-settle more Syrian refugees in the United States. The Obama administration has said it hopes to take in 10,000 Syrian refugees. Over the past several months, they've only accepted about 1,700 refugees. In May, Kaine signed a letter with 26 fellow senators asking the administration speed things up. "We have to make sure that people are screened appropriately and that they're safe, but the scr...Continue Reading

Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine are trying to prevent the Defense Department from privatizing commissaries at five major installations in a pilot program until it completes a cost-benefit study on commissary privatization. Congress asked for such a study last year. The five targeted commissaries for the pilot have not been identified. The two Virginians said it would be imprudent to start the pilot, and possibly jeopardize an important benefit to military families and retirees before the stud...Continue Reading

With complaints growing about long wait times to get through the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) screening at airports, some lawmakers are calling for an increase in funding for the agency. U.S. Senator Tim Kaine, D-VA, joined 22 of his colleagues in signing a lettercalling for more resources. Despite the booming travel industry, Kaine's office says TSA has lost $250 million in funding since 2011. "I’m trying to make sure that Congress does the right thing to appr...Continue Reading

Sens. Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine are among a group of senators pushing for action on a list of stalled health care projects at the Department of Veterans Affairs that includes an outpatient center planned for South Hampton Roads. Fifteen senators sent a letter Monday to the leaders of the SenateVeterans Affairs Committee urging authorization of leases for the projects. The list includes three each in California and Florida, research facilities in Boston and Charleston,...Continue Reading

The fiscal 2017 budget is a “make or break” point for cybersecurity and the federal government, said a top Department of Homeland Security official. “The Department of Defense has gotten, I think from my civilian perspective, pretty steady and good funding for what they are trying to do in [U.S.] Cyber Command,” said Andy Ozment, assistant secretary for cybersecurity and communications at DHS. “Relatively speaking [we have] not put as much funding into civilian gove...Continue Reading

U.S. lawmakers said Tuesday they are encouraged by growing defense cooperation with India but remain concerned about religious intolerance and slavery in the South Asian nation ahead of a visit by its prime minister. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee examined ties between the world's two largest democracies in advance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's address to Congress. There is strong support among U.S. lawmakers for deeper relations with India, but plenty of grumbles about limited progr...Continue Reading

As warm weather returns and the last days of school draw near, I’m sure that, like me, you’re looking forward to spending a lot of time outdoors this summer. As you read troubling headlines from Latin America and other parts of the world about the Zika virus, I’m also sure you are concerned about how to keep yourself and your family safe. #Let’s first understand the virus and the threat it poses to Virginia. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC...Continue Reading

Danville’s Youth City Council met Sen. Tim Kaine at the U.S. Capitol on their tour of Washington, D.C. on May 17. Pictured (from left) are Rebecca Rodden, Mary Kate Milam, Senator Kaine, Reginald Jeffries, Ishmale Davis, Kristen Harper-Edwards, Dacia Marable and Kameron Walker.

If Hillary Clinton should pick Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine as a running mate, we don’t know whether that will excite or depress Bernie Sanders supporters — apparently a key consideration in the Clinton camp. However, this much seems certain: Selecting Kaine might put a lot of members of Congress on the spot, on both sides of the aisle. We refer, of course, to Kaine’s two-year quest to persuade Congress to do its constitutional duty — to vote on whether to authorize...Continue Reading

For Hampton Roads, where Pentagon dollars are a lifeblood of the economy, the 2017 spending proposals making their way through the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate are mostly good news. Sailors should get a pay raise. The region’s shipbuilding and repair industries are in line to be fully funded. The legislative plans would block President Barack Obama’s desire to start a new round of military base closings and stifle the Navy’s desire to mothball 11 cruisers, including...Continue Reading

U.S. Senators Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine have applauded Senate passage of the Fiscal Year 2017 Energy and Water Development funding legislation, by a bipartisan vote of 90-8. The first of 12 appropriations bills providing discretionary funding for the federal government, the bill provides funding for projects under the direction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation at the Department of the Interior, the Department of Energy, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The ...Continue Reading

The Senate's marked-up defense spending bills has lots of good news for Virginia -- and a big worry for the Virginian member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. That's because it includes sweeping reforms of the Defense Departmentthat were presented to committee members a week ago, under an embargo that kept the proposal in-house, said Sen. Tim Kaine.  One result  -- he says he's changed his mind about supporting the committee's longstanding practice of marking up the def...Continue Reading

FISHERSVILLE-Rural hospitals like Augusta Health suffer financially on the reimbursement for Medicare patients, who account for about 50 percent of the operation's patient load. But federal legislation introduced last month by two Virginia U.S. senators would buck up the Medicare reimbursement formula for rural hospitals. The Fair Medicare Hospital Payments Act of 2016, a bipartisan bill sponsored by Virginia Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, would establish a national minimum wage index for Medi...Continue Reading