In The News

U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., wants to flip the calendar on government shutdowns. With a potential shutdown looming late Saturday night, Kaine introduced legislation on Wednesday that would move the start of the federal fiscal year from Oct. 1 to Jan. 1. The bill attempts to match Congress’s customary practice of adopting a budget in December and reduce the opportunity for political threats to shut down the government by prohibiting spending for non-essential federal services. His legislation seek...Continue Reading

Four years after they first linked arms — forging an unlikely alliance to claw back war powers in Iraq — Democrats’ ex-vice presidential nominee and Republicans’ former Senate campaigns chief are closing in on victory. It was hardly a given that Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Todd Young (R-Ind.) would finally notch the votes and time they needed for the Senate to formally repeal Congress’ 1991 and 2002 authorizations for military action in Iraq. After all, Washington is still adjusting to divided g...Continue Reading

U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., wants to change federal law to push employees to save for their retirement. Kaine and Rep. Kathy Manning, a North Carolina Democrat, introduced the Auto Enrollment Act in both chambers of Congress on Friday to encourage employers to automatically enroll employees in workplace retirement plans unless the workers choose to opt out. Many employers already use automatic enrollment to provide a retirement savings plan to new employees, but workers often opt out, even if th...Continue Reading

Senator Tim Kaine received a distinguished civilian service award from Army Secretary Eric Fanning Thursday. The award was given to Kaine for his work making the military more inclusive. The senator said on Twitter that he was humbled to receive the honor.

When U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., arrived at the Greater Prince William Community Health Center in Woodbridge on Jan. 5, he was looking for more than just a tour of the facility’s narrow hallways — he was looking for some political ammunition to bring back to Washington. The former vice presidential nominee is gearing up for the first major fight of the new Congress. As Republicans ready their long-promised efforts to repeal President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law, he ...Continue Reading

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va) spoke out Wednesday about Trump and the Republican party's plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Trump had said during his first press conference that the repeal and replace would happen simultaneously. Kaine said the probability of that happening would be highly unlikely. "I think it's unrealistic to think you can repeal and then pass something the same day that hasn't been vetted at all, because if you do that you have no way of knowing whether the rep...Continue Reading

Sen. Tim Kaine has been trying for more than two years to get Congress to consider a formal authorization for the use of military force in the struggle against the Islamic State -- and it looks now as if his effort is about to become a Senate Armed Services Committee priority. Yesterday, after again making his point that the Constitution requires Congress to approve the dispatch of American military men and women into harms way, Kaine sparked this response from comm...Continue Reading

The Affordable Care Act enabled me to start my own business, because it provided me individual, affordable access to health care. There have been challenges with the system -- online glitches, confusing rules, and rising prices -- but these issues could be tweaked. Congressional Republicans are threatening to repeal the law immediately, without any alternative in place. This action would leave millions of Americans without health insurance. A report released by the U.S. Department of Health and ...Continue Reading

U.S. Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine will be among those asking questions this week as Senate committees begin publicly vetting President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees. The two Virginia Democrats said Monday they won’t pass judgment until after the hearings, but they expressed deep concerns about some candidates – given their limited experience, incomplete background checks or views on how they might run their department of the government. They were supportive of other ...Continue Reading

A job fair combining the cyber world with the workforce is giving students with a thirst for technology a path forward. "When I came into Virginia Tech I knew I wanted to play with computers but I didn’t really know where I wanted to go," Virginia Tech senior Jonathan Defreeuw said. Defreeuw received a CyberCorps Scholarship for Service, a program designed to increase the number of government jobs in cyber security. Now he’s joining hundreds of other scholarship students hoping ...Continue Reading

With Donald Trump set to assume the presidency on Jan. 20, a battle is brewing in Congress over his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act even as legislators decide on its replacement. The Virginia delegation is weighing in from both sides. On Wednesday, Rep. Dave Brat, R-Richmond, posted on Twitter that congress needed to repeal Obamacare and replace it with free market solutions to reduce costs, saying President Barack Obama’s signature legislation had resulted in skyrocketing costs...Continue Reading

Republicans are preparing to drive American healthcare off a cliff by repealing the Affordable Care Act, Sen. Tim Kaine said Thursday morning, and if they do, they should not plan on getting help from Democrats to help pick up the pieces down the road. Instead, Kaine said, the time to fix the healthcare legislation is now. “Look, can this law be improved? Can the health care system be improved? Sure it can and we ought to be working together to do that,” the former Democratic vice p...Continue Reading

The story of a Williamsburg couple's rekindled hopes of starting a family wasn't enough to convince the Senate to go along with Sen. Tim Kaine's call to slow the Republican majority's rush to repeal Obamacare. Kaine took his Democratic caucus's lead Thursday to insist that Congress had to have a replacement ready to go before repealing or reforming the Affordable Care Act, hoping to amend fast-track legislation to dismantle the controversial health insurance law. But Senate Majori...Continue Reading

With Republican leaders pressing to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, possibly within weeks, moderate Senate Democrats reached out on Thursday to Republicans, appealing for them to slow down the repeal efforts and let lawmakers try to find acceptable, bipartisan changes to make the existing law work better. Democrats also had new reason to hope for possible Republican defections after Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin said that the repeal measure would cut off federal funds for Planned Parentho...Continue Reading

Midway through a Senate committee hearing on foreign cyberthreats Thursday, Sen. Tim Kaine took a moment to settle a score against an old nemesis — retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn. Kaine (D-Va.), the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in the presidential election in November, lit into President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be national security adviser for promoting “fake” news stories on social media during the 2016 campaign that “most fourth-gr...Continue Reading

U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine is taking a lead role in a Democratic effort to block the quick repeal of the Affordable Care Act and instead advocate reforms to the law that he says would protect access to health care, affordability and quality of care. In a 23-minute speech on the Senate floor on Thursday, Kaine, D-Va., introduced an amendment to the fast-track budget process pushed by Republicans to repeal the health care law President Barack Obama signed in 2010. The amendment, co-sponsored by Sen. Chr...Continue Reading

It is quiet now and a time of reflection for Sen. Tim Kaine. Less than two months after a bruising presidential campaign in which Kaine visited more than 40 states as Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential running mate, he is at peace and looking forward. The disappointment of the loss of the presidency to Republican Donald Trump is behind Kaine. He is looking ahead to a January return to the 115th Congress. “Things happen for a reason,’’ Kaine said during a recent interv...Continue Reading

When Sen. Tim Kaine heads back to Washington next month, he's bringing some messages from a unique Peninsula program for moms and moms-to-be struggling to recover from addiction. One is from Jamie Watford and her tiny 6-week-old, Evan. She was lucky enough to find a place in the Hampton-Newport News Community Services Board's South-Eastern Family Project. But when she moved there from jail, a pregnant cellmate stayed behind, she told Kaine during the senator's visit to the family proje...Continue Reading

Sen. Tim Kaine came to Petersburg National Battlefield yesterday to see firsthand some of the land that will soon be incorporated into the battlefield. It was a symbolic victory lap for Kaine, who with other Virginia lawmakers has spent years on legislation that wold expand the battlefield to more than 7,000 acres, tripling its size and making it the largest military park in the nation. Though the effort took more than a decade, Kaine expressed happiness that the government was able to get it d...Continue Reading