So far during my seven years as a state legislator, the #Virginia General Assembly has passed and the Governor has signed 51 of my bills into law — all with bipartisan support — including 14 to feed hungry kids.

Let’s break down what each of those 14 school meals bills do. 🧵 2018: During my first session, my constituent Adelle (who’s an attorney) drafted and I introduced what we call our school meals omnibus bill, dealing with a lot of topics in this space.
The Rs killed it but this gave us a framework. We then introduced part after part separately.

Of my 10 Senate Bills that passed the Virginia General Assembly this year, all earned bipartisan votes in both chambers.

Nine of those bills passed the Senate either unanimously or with only 1 of 40 members voting no.

In the 100-member House, all 10 passed with 65-100 votes.🧵 The only outlier for either chamber was my bill to extend the area where speed cameras are allowed near school crossing zones by 250 feet for intersections with a crosswalk where there’s been a fatality since 2014.

The Governor’s administration endorsed the bill in the House.

During my six years in the House of Delegates, we’ve passed 41 of my bills into law — all with bipartisan support, including 23 signed our most recent Democratic governor and 18 signed by our current Republican governor.

I’ve never had a bill fail in the Senate or be vetoed. 🧵 With Democratic majorities in both chambers next year, we would could pass bills to end school meal debt with universal free school meals, increase transportation safety funding, standardize training for court-appointed guardians, protect internment rights on fmr heirs property…

Capitol Hill Republicans are actively trying to defund free school meals for kids in need.

Richmond Republicans this year voted party-line in the House Education Committee’s K-12 subcommittee against Del. @mikemullin4VA’s bill to provide universal free school meals. State legislators in Democratic-led states this year passed bills to feed every kid at no cost, to save their parents up to $1K per kid, and to relieve the administrative burden for school officials so they can focus on education.

Contrast that with this:
newsweek.com/republicans-pl…

To the people of the City of Manassas Park and the PWC portions of Haymarket, Gainesville and my lifelong home of Manassas:

On Jan. 11, I’ll begin my sixth and final year of serving you in the Virginia House of Delegates. I’m so grateful to advocate for you and our community.🧵 I’ll spend much of 2023 going door to door as always, asking to earn your vote so I can continue serving you by representing the new, open 30th District of the Virginia state Senate, which also includes the PWC parts of Broad Run, Catharpin and Bristow and the City of Manassas.

I know a lot of y’all are concerned about the bill in the Virginia state Senate attacking trans health care.

I have no doubt our @VASenateDems’ 21-19 majority will defeat it, just like each of the last 56 Senate Bills filed by the same Republican patron of this bill since 2020. This is the patron’s pass/fail rate for Senate Bills as chief patron:

21-19 Democratic majority:
2022: 0-for-22
2021: 0-for-11
2020: 0-for-21
2020 SS1: 0-2

21-19 Republican majority:
2019: 5-for-18
2018: 6-for-20
2017: 0-for-10
2016: 1-for-4

Total: 12-for-108 (11.1%)

1) Parents do matter — and you’ve ignored the parents of trans kids in Virginia schools who told you the actual text of your proposal beyond your rhetoric hurts their children.

2) You oppose the right of LGBTQ parents to marry so they can legally protect their families.

(1/4)

https://twitter.com/GovernorVA/status/1572354033813176320

3) Executive fiat doesn’t overrule settled law, like Grimm v. GCSB, Article 8, Section 7 the Constitution of Virginia, or Section B-1 of the Virginia Human Rights Act.

4) Your own party in the House said the gov’t can’t dictate the rules for the privately-run VHSL 3/7/18.

(2/4)

While listening to Mandatory Metallica on @SXMLiquidMetal tonight in celebration of the 30th anniversary of The Black Album, I was thinking about what it meant to me as a teenager in the late '90s, a few years after it debuted in '91.
So here's a meandering, rambling story. Middle school is when my taste in music started expanding beyond classic rock, which is what I was raised on from basically birth. My sister was big into grunge, so I picked up some of that from her (Nirvana, Alice in Chains) along with a few alternative bands (Live Sublime).

Danica’s snow day brownie recipe:

1) Notice brownie mix from Christmas.
2) Empty contents while pre-heating oven to 350.
3) Add egg.
4) Add three tablespoons of water like the package says.
5) Struggle stirring.
6) Like, a lot.
7) Ask, “Is this really supposed to be food?” 8) Realize you don’t have an 8x8 baking dish, so the rectangular one you got from the bank four years ago for opening a checking account will have to do.
9) Observe that you’ve created quicksand and it feasts on hands, snapped wrists and spoons from your parents’ wedding in 1972.

Everyone:

*Really* think about this.

This is the text of my bill the Courts of Justice Cmte passed 13-8.

It bans the gay/trans panic defense.

Someone will invoke it to say someone *simply being LGBTQ* is sufficient reason to maim/kill them.

Eight of my R colleagues voted no. Read the text:

"Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the discovery of, perception of, or belief about another person's actual or perceived sex, gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation, whether or not accurate, is not a defense to any charge of capital murder...

For the Sideshow Conspiracy Caucus of Congress -- central platform: "Bleh! Faux victimhood manufactured from disinformation! Bleh!" -- two observations:
1) They likely won't pass any bills, even if their party regains power.
2) They won't lose votes for their ineffectiveness. Generally speaking, "ineffective" doesn't resonate with strong intensity for voters when you're driving up someone's negatives -- unless you tie it to something hyper-sensitive to their district, like if they couldn't prevent a major employer from closing despite intervention.

We need to flip a *lot* of state legislatures - and hold our Dem majorities.

Some R legislatures rushed draconian bills to gut civil rights for the intent of getting them to the SCOTUS. See: Mississippi. Others held off because they’d lose.

Now they’re going to feel emboldened. They’ve been planning for this — and the electoral wipeout of 2010 in which we lost hundreds upon hundreds of Democratic state legislative seats supercharged this strategy.

They’re so hellbent on voter disenfranchisement right now because our votes are all that’s in their way.

One of my best friends called me today, just to check in & catch up.
When we talked about work, she asked me about how I navigate the political pitfalls in Richmond.
You can’t control how other people act.
What you can control is how hard you work and that you work in good faith. I’ve never missed a House floor session. The only time you won’t see me in a subcommittee/committee meeting I’m assigned to is if I’m defending one of my bills elsewhere.
My team & I show up, we’re prepared and we serve the people of the 13th District to the best of our ability.

I want to take a minute to write about journalism. I'm not canceling my @InsideNoVA subscription, regardless of disagreeing with the editorial page.
The institution of journalism is too important to fail. That doesn't mean though opinion writers are beyond reproach or criticism. I filed my Shield Law (HB113) for the third year in a row in 2020 because I believe in the institution of journalism. That's my bill I'm most proud of passing.
Journalism need to be valued and protected. The public needs to trust that the government can't/won't silence reporters.

Story time:
Last week when hundreds of y'all joined me in helping out Mount Pleasant Baptist Church in Gainesville after a 2012 arson fire gutted the building that's been an institution of the Black community in western PWC since the 1880s, y'all donating were quite diverse: A fundraising drive led by a trans woman (hi), with donations from LGBTQ folks, religious folks, atheists, non-theists, people in western Prince William County and as far west as Oregon, different races and ideologies... it was all for MPBC, which has less than 150 members.

Today I spoke to a @USDA official who confirmed USDA does require kids to be present to receive meals being distributed at school sites but added the policy is now under review.
I said I have a 7-year-old constituent with cancer who this policy leaves out.
Here's what happened: The official explained to me that the school sites for distribution are generally in low income areas and that without the verification of the kids being present since it's not just limited to students, people without kids could take advantage of it.
There are problems with that:

Yesterday I drove northbound along Route 28 from Manassas to Sterling so I could see the changes since session began Jan. 8.
The two biggest are now both northbound traffic lights north of I-66 are gone (left-turn lanes that don’t affect northbound flow remain).
#FixRoute28 The left-turn lanes at Braddock have been sectioned off from northbound Route 28 for a few months now, which is great. It was nice to see the Route 28 entrance to Lawrence Park is now closed off with the left lane just for U-turns now and no access onto northbound Route 28.

(Thread)
I thought I'd offer a primer about my job and what it is that I do. Feel free to pass it along.
1) Hi. I'm a state delegate in the Virginia House of Delegates. It's the same thing as a state representative. I'm not a member of the U.S. Congress. I'm in state government. 2) Our legislature is called the Virginia General Assembly. It's in Richmond.
Like Congress, it has two chambers: the House of Delegates (our version of the House of Representatives) and the state Senate.
The House of Delegates has 100 members. The Senate has 40 members.

Baltimore is where I went on my first date with the love of my life.
Baltimore is where I learned it’s okay to fall in love again.
Baltimore is where I saw my favorite band for the first time.
Baltimore is a place that opened its doors to my own music again and again. Baltimore is also a city where two centuries of systemic poverty, racism and classism is violence and breeds further violence, especially toward trans women of color.
All of these are realities of the city.
What we do about it is the difference between uniting and hurting people.

I try not to weigh in on BS like this but for perspective:
At this time in 2016, the HS seniors I saw in Nokesville and Manassas today were freshmen.
This is the cynical example of gov’t he’s set for them their entire HS tenures: win without integrity and don’t trust politicians.

https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1133595118483779585

And if your reaction to that is, “Well, sounds like he’s telling it like it is,” then that’s exactly the premise that needs to be challenged.
We shouldn't accept that cynicism, let alone celebrate it.
When you’ve seen this mindset of “win at all costs” up close, it’s even worse.

Since ‘17, I’ve been told I’m mentally ill, I’m an it, I need a bullet between my eyes, I’m an enemy of God & my gender identity is because of my father’s suicide.
And for all they called me, my constituents call me Delegate.
You can thrive because of who you are, not despite it. To every person who knows what it’s like to be singled out and stigmatized because of your inherent identifiers,
Never, ever, ever let them grind you down.
You didn’t make it this far because of someone’s hate.
You’re still here because your spark of life outshines that darkness.