In The News

Projects to help restore the Chesapeake Bay will be getting more than $18 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, part of more than $370 million in competitive conservation grants awarded across the country. The projects include measures to restore wetlands and forested buffers to reduce nutrient overload in the bay and rewarding farmers for implementing higher-impact conservation practices. Virginia Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine praised Wednesday's announcement by U.S. Agriculture Se...Continue Reading

Sen. Tim Kaine will invite Lisa Barnett, coordinator for Career and Technical Education for Botetourt County Public Schools, as his guest to the President’s State of the Union Address on Tuesday, Jan. 20. Kaine co-chairs the bipartisan Senate Career and Technical Education Caucus and has made improving CTE one of his top priorities in the Senate. He grew up working in his father’s ironworking shop and spent a year as a missionary in Honduras, where he worked as the principal of a sch...Continue Reading

With former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell heading to prison for two years, two former Virginia governors are calling for ethics reform in Richmond.  When McDonnell was charged with corruption for accepting gifts, like a head turning Rolex watch, many political watchers in Richmond figured he would escape punishment. That’s because the state’s ethics laws are some of the weakest in the nation, according to watchdog groups. But federal laws ultimately snagged McDonnell and his w...Continue Reading

Sen. Tim Kaine expressed optimism Tuesday after a meeting with VA Secretary Robert McDonald to discuss, among other issues, long wait times for patients at the Hampton VA Medical Center. In a news release, Kaine called the meeting "very positive" and said he was pleased with McDonald's performance since being named to succeed embattled former secretary Eric Shinseki. The senator said he also voiced concern over the backlog in adjudicating claims for disability benefits "and a culture at VA hospi...Continue Reading

Some of the most influential senators in the new Congress are neither in the majority nor among the longest-serving. They don’t show up on the Sunday-morning talk shows, and they aren’t talking about running for president in 2016. Instead, they’re a pack of Democrats from mostly smaller, rural states who are inclined to work with Republicans on legislation President Obama doesn’t support. They may even be willing to help the GOP override his vetoes. Some of them support b...Continue Reading

Two members of Virginia’s congressional delegation made headlines last week for legislation they introduced in the 114th Congress. They were U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte. Their initiatives paint a stark contrast between meaningful legislation and utter political hokum. That’s something we all should keep our eyes on, because there’s too little of the former and way too much of the latter. We shall deal with Kaine’s proposal first. He’s a Democrat who...Continue Reading

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., is that refreshing, if too rare, Washington type: a workhorse rather than a show horse. Kaine has been making a lot of his Capitol Hill colleagues uncomfortable by continuing to publicly point out during the six months U.S. troops have been at war against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria that by refusing to even debate the authorization of military force, they are guilty of an "unacceptable abdication" of their "most solemn responsibility" as members of Congress &...Continue Reading

Virginia’s two Democratic Senators are expected to hold a lot of sway as more moderate voices in the new Republican controlled Senate. Republicans now control the Senate, but that doesn’t mean they can go it alone. In the upper chamber you need 60 votes to do just about anything and there are only 54 Republicans. That’s already making Virginia’s senators prime targets for Republicans looking to build bipartisan coalitions. Senator Mark Warner is already bucking many in hi...Continue Reading

JAMES CITY— News that he'd been chosen as a delegate in theU.S. Senate Youth Program came on a day when Caleb Visser really needed something good to happen. "I was having a really long and arduous day," the Jamestown High School senior said in an interview. "I was frustrated with one of my classes. I had been sick a couple of days before. I had missed one of my tests, and I had to make that up, and I was just exhausted because we have swim practice every morning and I get up at 4:15 f...Continue Reading

Sen. Kaine has been named the top Democrat on a key panel of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The Subcommittee on Readiness deals with resources for shipyards, military construction projects and whether bases should be shifted or closed. Overall, it deals with legislation aimed at training, logistics and maintenance for U.S. armed forces. The announcment came from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who chairs the full commmittee. Kaine has been a member of the readiness panel for two years. In a sta...Continue Reading

Few states have been Ground Zero for America’s domestic wars as Virginia has been, something which grabbed the attention of Sen. Tim Kaine when he was governor of the Old Dominion, site of the first successful English colony. As governor, the Democrat allocated more than $5 million for Civil War battlefield preservation. Now he has helped win congressional approval to expand that effort to Revolutionary War and War of 1812 sites, with the help of the Civil War Trust. “Virginia i...Continue Reading

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) called on Congress Thursday to authorize the U.S. military action against the Islamic State terror group, five months into its airstrike campaign. “Today we enter the sixth month of war against ISIL without Congressional authorization," Kaine, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committee, said in a statement Thursday. The U.S.-led coalition began its airstrike campaign against the group, known alternately as ISIS or ISIL, last August. There h...Continue Reading

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Tim Kaine has a list of global concerns, but that list is topped by the threat posed by the terrorist group ISIS. Since June, Virginia's junior U.S. senator has argued that Congress needs to authorize military force against ISIS. That policy stand received a boost when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 10-8 earlier this month for the use of military force against ISIS. Because the full Senate didn't vote before adjournment, similar action on ISIS will be needed by t...Continue Reading

Washington’s political culture suffers from many deficiencies, not least among them a team-sports approach to politics that elevates superficial point-scoring above questions of substance and weight. Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine has marched admirably against those headwinds. Kaine himself has conceded that politics is a team sport. But he has risen above it through his dogged determination to produce a serious debate over war powers, particularly regarding U.S. military action against the Islam...Continue Reading

COLONIAL HEIGHTS — Volunteers at the Colonial Heights Food Pantry got to work alongside Sen. Tim Kaine yesterday as part of his three-day statewide tour. Kaine and his office stopped at the food pantry in Colonial Heights for a Citizen Day service project. “About every quarter we try to do what we call Citizen Day where folks from our office come out and do some work with a local nonprofit. It could be anywhere in the state,” Kaine said. “We think it’s good to learn...Continue Reading

Sen. Tim Kaine stood in the Larchmont neighborhood street and took in the strange view. "There are two over there," he said Thursday morning, pointing to homes across a sparkling inlet of the Lafayette River. "And two right there. There's one over there. And another one down there." He was talking about older homes elevated on new cinder block foundations to rise above flood waters that plague the neighborhood. The raised homes are scattershot, some here, some there. In a way, the scene reflects...Continue Reading

Sen. Tim Kaine stepped inside a training simulator at Fort Eustis on Thursday and deftly piloted a small Army craft through the water. This kind of realistic training — complete with three-dimensional images and weather that gets nasty at the touch of a button — can allow experienced Army mariners to make a lucrative transition to the private sector when they choose to leave military service. It is exactly the type of training that interests Kaine. As a member of the Senate Armed Ser...Continue Reading

Six weeks after a catastrophic rocket explosion on Virginia’s Wallops Island, Sen. Timothy M. Kaine toured the damaged site and touted $20 million in federal funds for the private space facility. The funds should help “speed along” the repairs from an Oct. 28 crash, Kaine (D-Va.) said Wednesday, noting that the launchpad run by Orbital Sciences Corp. “survived remarkably well.” Repairing the site — and public confidence in the commercial space industry —...Continue Reading

U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine talked with Chincoteague officials and business representatives about economic concerns and toured a damaged launch pad on Wallops Island on the first day of his two-day tour of the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Kaine sounded bullish on the Wallops spaceport's prospects, despite the setback caused by a rocket failure in October. Along with fellow Democratic Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia and Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, he was instrumental in securing $20 million in federal fund...Continue Reading

The U.S. Senate confirmed late Tuesday night Elizabeth Dillon, a Salem attorney, for a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia. Dillon is the first woman to serve as a federal judge in the Western District of Virginia, which stretches from Lynchburg to Lee County and extends north to Winchester. President Barack Obama nominated Dillon to fill the vacancy left by Judge Samuel Wilson, who retired in August. Dillon, a former assistant city attorney for Roanoke, practice...Continue Reading