In the News
While some world leaders sleep at the wheel waiting until the policy winds change, African leaders are wide awake and taking the future of climate change action into their own hands.
With the federal government shutdown now in its third week with no end in sight, Virginia lawmakers and advocates are concerned that funding for food assistancemay run out in November.
Mama J’s Kitchen co-owner Lester Johnson is one of 400,000 Virginians who purchase health insurance through the Virginia Insurance Marketplace. As he prepared to renew his plan when open enrollment starts on Nov. 1, Lester checked his premium bill. Without the tax credit he receives to help lower his insurance premium, the cost of his insurance plan will double.
Several House Democrats bashed the idea of a one-year extension of enhanced Obamacare subsidies during a press call this morning, arguing that Congress must go bigger.
The call with members from Virginia — where the impacts of a government shutdown will be felt deeply — underscored how Democrats are digging in on health care in the funding fight.
The woman who represents Virginia’s 4th Congressional District made a stop in Charlottesville on Wednesday, August 27, warning of the effects that federal cuts will have on the Commonwealth’s budget.
Richmond resident Asia Broadie is juggling being a single parent, a restaurant worker and a nursing assistant student whose apartment rent absorbs much of her income. On Monday in Capitol Square, alongside U.S. Rep. Jennifer McClellan, D-Richmond, and state Sen. Ghazala Hashmi, D-Richmond, Brody said the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is essential for keeping food on her family’s plates.
Virginia’s Fourth District Congresswoman Jennifer McClellan said the pending cuts to SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, could impact about 34,000 of her constituents and the grocery stores that serve them, even those in rural Surry County.
“As I saw when I visited the only grocery store in Surry County, Surry Market, if they close people will have to drive at least 30 miles to get fresh food,” McClellan said Monday.
Democratic Congresswoman Jennifer McClellan joined several advocates to discuss the impacts SNAP cuts will have on Virginia’s budget at an event on Monday in Richmond.
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the spending bill will cut $187 billion of federal funding by 2034, leaving hundreds of thousands of Virginia families at risk of losing SNAP benefits.
“SNAP not only keeps food on the table but, as you heard, it helps keep children healthy in the long term,” McClellan said.
In an article as a law student at the University of Virginia, future Congresswoman Jennifer McClellan rebutted as un-American a movement that had gained momentum to make English the nation’s official language.
In the nation’s early days, government accommodated language minorities, she noted. “The code of Virginia used to be printed in German because we had such a large German population,” McClellan, D-4th, said in an interview Thursday.
This week marks the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, landmark legislation that outlawed racist voter disenfranchisement and expanded voting rights to Black Americans whose ability to cast a ballot had been severely limited, especially in Virginia and other states in the South. U.S. Rep.