In The News

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

The number of people killed by terror attacks in Africa in the last year is as large, if not larger, than the deaths inflicted by ISIS in the Middle East, U.S. officials said Tuesday. In response to the assessment, a senior lawmaker questioned whether race explains why the U.S. is not more involved in the fight there. Obama administration officials testifying before the Senate said that even as Africans continue to struggle with militant groups such as Boko Haram and al-Shabaab, they face the ...Continue Reading

Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine are among 40 Democratic Senators asking for the Department of Education to weigh in on LGBT rights. Lawmakers sent a letter to the department asking for guidelines on the protection of LGBT students. The senators say it’s in response to laws like one passed in North Carolina, which requires transgender people to use bathrooms in state buildings and schools corresponding to the gender on their birth certificates. While a similar bill died in Virginia, some...Continue Reading

In 1786, while living in Paris, Thomas Jefferson recalled his Virginia home to his friend Maria Cosway, writing, “Where has Nature spread so rich a mantle under the eye? Mountains, forests, rocks, rivers. With what majesty do we there ride above the storms! How sublime to look down into the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet! And the glorious Sun, when rising as if out of a distant water, just gilding the tops of the mountains, and...Continue Reading

Senators aren’t too keen on a House Republican proposal to give them a say in who the president appoints as the head of the National Security Council, which the GOP and several former Defense secretaries complain has ballooned out of control. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) is expected to propose a measure to winnow the size of the White House’s security apparatus and subject its chief to Senate confirmation when the annual defense authorization ...Continue Reading

Representatives and senators from Virginia are joining Gov. Terry McAuliffe in encouraging the Obama administration into reconsidering issuing a major disaster declaration following a winter storm. Representatives Rob Whittman and Randy Forbes along with Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner are asking the president for help after tornadoes hit Virginia back in February. The storm included a deadly EF1 tornado with 110 MPH winds that tore through the town of Waverly, killing three pe...Continue Reading