Governors Of Virginia

"I am humbled by the trust you have placed in me. With the support of God and my family, I pledge my energy and enthusiasm to the mission of serving this Commonwealth."

"Childress and Vignesh Senthil — another event co-organizer and Medicine student — said they were both grateful Senator Kaine and his staff were able to participate in this conversation on such short notice. Senthil was additionally grateful for Kaine’s honesty about what he can and cannot accomplish as of now."

"Kaine also spoke to more localized strategies that could be used by University constituents facing pushback against DEI and research cuts. For example, one faculty member said that a course he teaches in the School of Medicine was recently under review for DEI compliance and several slides focused on health disparities were pulled. He asked Kaine for advice on what health professionals should do in these circumstances. Kaine said that — though it is not what he personally believes in — sometimes the terminology has to be changed. “I hate to give you this advice,” Kaine said. “But, if you have to change the terminology, because these guys have five buzz words they don't like, as long as you can serve the same people, change the terminology.”"

"Noting that the Republicans currently hold the majority in the U.S. Senate, one audience member asked if there is anything Kaine can do on a federal level in response to the Department of Justice’s pressure on the University. Kaine said that it is “tough” to take direct, tangible action currently, but that he is working with Sen. Mark Warner to figure out ways, and that he is interested in communicating with members of the Republican Party."

"Sen. Tim Kaine held a conversation with a group of graduate University students and faculty members Friday at the Central Library of the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library system. In an informal Q&A session, audience members asked about threats to federal research, the future of diversity, equity and inclusion at the University, potential shifts in the Democratic Party and more. According to Alexia Childress, event co-organizer and School of Medicine student, event co-organizer and Medicine student, the event was organized by several medical students in the wake of former University President Jim Ryan’s resignation. Many of those in attendance on Friday were from the School of Medicine, but there were faculty and staff from various other University departments and schools as well."

"Tim Kaine has a message of fiscal responsibility and generosity of spirit. That kind of message can sell anywhere."

"Virginians did not vote for this. Senator Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, and their sidekick, Abigail Spanberger, supported a government shutdown. They chose politics over people and left families wondering how they’ll pay their bills. At a time when Virginians need leadership, they chose to play games."

"America deserves a leader focused on solving problems, not someone who treats chaos and disruption as tools of governing. Instead of threatening government employees and the American public with even more mass layoffs and federal dysfunction, President Trump should come to the table and negotiate a funding bill that prevents health care premiums from skyrocketing for families and keeps the government operational. If President Trump truly cares about the American people, he will work with Congress to avoid a shutdown of his own making."

"I seek the help of all Virginians – regardless of party or region, race or religion – in keeping the promise of Virginia. Let us rise to the leadership example of Virginia’s first four hundred years. Let us affirm and carry forward our values of courage, opportunity and community. Let us remember that civility is not a sign of weakness – that cooperation and compromise are necessary for progress and for the sensible solutions we can all embrace to keep the promise of Virginia strong. Under God’s hand, we have thrived. If we stay faithful to our history, we will succeed. Let us work together. Let us begin."

"To those who serve in local governments: I pledge an administration that is a good partner with a focus on cooperation and collaboration. The people we serve are the same people you serve. When we work together, we serve them better."

"Together, let us find answers through a dialogue that is shaped not simply in terms of dollars and cents, but also by new solutions and common sense. A lack of coordination and planning has us stuck where we are today. Let it not be fear and politics that leaves us stranded here."

"Our challenges today are different than those faced by the Jamestown settlers, or the first Virginia governors. But they require fidelity to the same values. We may not have new geographic worlds to discover, but there are still worlds of research and knowledge, of information and creativity, of commerce and service, of reconciliation and brotherhood, that await our exploration."

"That same sense of community is required of us today. We must include all Virginians in our efforts. We should continue to welcome newcomers to this Commonwealth and nation, just as Chief Powhatan did 400 years ago."

"And third, we recognize that our destiny is a shared destiny and that our commitment to community is a condition of our advancement. Our Virginia might not exist today were it not for the generosity extended to those first settlers by the native Virginia tribes living in this region. Without the hospitality of Chief Powhatan or the compassion of Pocahontas, those in Jamestown would have perished. Throughout Virginia’s history, we have succeeded only when we have welcomed all to the table of Thanksgiving."

"Second, we acknowledge that individual opportunity is the most powerful engine of progress. The first English settlers came as part of a commercial venture, the Virginia Company, seeking economic riches in the New World. Others came seeking the opportunity to worship as they pleased or to trade away an aristocracy of birth for an aristocracy of merit. When individuals have the opportunity to set their own purpose, and determine the bar for their own achievements, they are able to harness their God-given talents and ensure our economic and social success."

"First, we reaffirm the necessity of courage. This is the defining trait of those who came to Virginia aboard the Discovery, Godspeed and Susan Constant, landing just a few miles from this place at Jamestown Island in 1607. They knew that earlier efforts, by the Spanish and English, to establish settlements in this region had ended in disaster. But they crossed treacherous seas to arrive at a new world because they understood the need to do and to dare. Their survival and success depended upon bold leadership. We must be equally bold to tackle the challenges of our day."

"Patrick Henry was sworn in here as the newly-formed Commonwealth’s first Governor in 1776 and, three years later, Thomas Jefferson followed in his footsteps. Henry and Jefferson stood here in the midst of a war raging on our country’s soil, a war that threatened the very existence of Virginia and our young nation. They stood here at a time, just as today, when Virginians serving freedom’s cause sacrificed their lives so that democracy could prevail over tyranny. They stood here proclaiming the Promise of Virginia, when the world around them doubted that the land of their vision would survive. Could Henry or Jefferson have imagined the powerful success of their democratic experiment, their beloved Virginia, as it appears today? As a people, we have come through storm after storm, working out the meaning of our own destiny and coming closer and closer to the Virginia ideal of equality that Jefferson articulated in America’s Declaration of Independence. As we stand here now, our hearts should be filled with the magnitude of the debt we owe to the generations of leaders – the celebrated and the unknown – who fought and worked to create our Commonwealth. The Promise of Virginia is bright today because of their efforts, and it is up to us to carry the work forward for future generations."

"We are less than two weeks away from the end of the government budget year, and Republicans need to stop wasting time on political show votes and start working with Democrats on a bipartisan budget agreement that ends sequestration and protects our national and economic security"

"There's a reason why you only do tax policy in a major way every few years — it's really complicated"

"When we see anti-Semitic activities and when we see swastikas painted, that is an attack on all of us as Virginians."

"Virginians stand with the Fairfax Jewish community."

"Today, the Senate voted on a proposal to restrict women’s reproductive health. While I was unable to vote today, I would have opposed this bill. Important medical decisions should be made between a woman and her doctor, not politicians in Washington."

"Byrd entered the Senate at a time when his America of farms and small towns, formerly insulated from the shocks of world affairs and modernization, was dying. Rather than adjust to the revolutionary changes that occurred over the course of his lifetime, he chose to contest their inroads, becoming a cipher whose predictable negativism and welfare legislation revealed a parochialism that bordered on meanness and miserliness. Driven by a desire to preserve the old order, Byrd spent over thirty years fighting ever-increasing federal bureaucracies and budgets, protecting states' rights from intrusions by Washington, and defending racial segregation. Focusing attention on waste in government and pressing for reductions in federal spending, he won some minor skirmishes, but he lost most of the battles. His political philosophy of unregulated individualism and limited government was no longer appropriate for the modern world. Much of his personal value system remained sound- hard work, thrift, initiative, and responsibility- but the demands of the highly technological, mass consumer, global society called for modifications to this individualistic ethic through community planning, resource management, public assistance for the dependent, aid to education, and international commitments. Without a political opposition that might have forced him to reevaluate his position, Byrd could not overcome the limitations of his upbringing and his experience. He remained caught in the time warp of the early twentieth century when the nation was still closely tied to the libertarian principles of the old yeomanry."

"I construe my election as a mandate to me as a businessman to institute the best methods of efficiency and economy in State affairs, so that the people may obtain in the public service a dollar's value for every dollar spent. Useless offices must be abolished, duplicated services must be consolidated, and the manifold activities of the State systematized and directed with the efficiency of a great business corporation."

"I favor a strong military but, if wartime spending is to be made a part of our budget in peacetime, and continued for many years, our system simply will not stand it."

"If we can organize the Southern states for massive resistance to this order... the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South."

"At the dedication of the Shenandoah National Park [July 3, 1936], President Roosevelt, [Secretary of the Interior] Harold L. Ickes, and I were riding together from Panorama to Big Meadows. I suggested to Mr. Roosevelt that it would be a fine idea to connect the two parks, Shenandoah National Park and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, by extending the Skyline Drive. He quickly agreed that it was an excellent idea but stated that we must begin up in New England. The President then said to me, "You and Ickes get together for the right-of-way." The New England governors were contacted but were not interested. In the meanwhile I was made chairman of the right-of-way commission. And that is how it got started."

"There are gentle men in whom gentility finally destroys whatever of iron there was in their souls. There are iron men in whom the iron corroded whatever gentility they possessed. There are men—not many to be sure—in whom the gentility and the iron were preserved in proper balance, each of these attributes to be summoned up as the occasion requires. Such a man was Harry Byrd."

"Byrd evinced no particular proclivity to endorse a state antilynching law in the wake of Raymond Bird’s death. But when a lynch mob struck in Virginia for the third year in a row, Jaffé pushed the hesitant governor to act. In the early morning hours of November 30, 1927, a Wise County mob, estimated at three hundred to four hundred people, lynched Leonard Woods on a platform that straddled the Virginia-Kentucky border. For days and weeks, authorities in both states quibbled over whether to charge the lynching to Kentucky or Virginia. Virginia’s governor condemned the act, but appeared satisfied that “Virginia has no legal jurisdiction.” In a private letter to Byrd, Jaffé pleaded with him to “find the means of forcing a showdown on this outrage.” Byrd replied that he would like to discuss the matter with Jaffé, but expressed reservations about such a law’s compatibility with the state constitution. Sensing reluctance on the part of the governor, Jaffé used his editorial page to condemn the inaction of local authorities and to urge publicly that Byrd take action. Jaffé argued that “lynching goes unpunished in Virginia because, deny it as one will, it commands a certain social sanction.” Jaffé explained that the eradication of mob violence mandated laws that punished not only the principal participants, but also all persons who “advise, encourage or promote” lynching. The Norfolk editor urged the commonwealth to strip mob members of the right to vote and hold office, and argued for strict fines and punishments in addition to those for murder. “In short,” concluded Jaffé, “lynching must be recognized as a State cancer, requiring direct State action. It must be rid of its social cachet and stamped with the State’s curse.”"

"Finally, on January 16, 1928, Byrd asked the Virginia General Assembly to declare lynching “a specific State offense” that would allow the state attorney general to prosecute lynchings in addition to local authorities; to force counties or cities in which a lynching occurred to pay $2,500 to the lawful heirs of the person lynched; and to authorize the governor to spend whatever money considered necessary and appropriate to bring to justice members of a mob. Carefully guarding himself against charges of violating local authority, Byrd added that “it should be made clear that declaring lynching as a specific State offense does not take away the constitutional rights of accused citizens for trial in localities where the crime was committed.” The governor’s caveat limited the likelihood that white Virginians would be convicted of lynching; friends and neighbors rarely recognized guilt in such cases. On February 3, state senators James Barron of Norfolk and Cecil Connor of Leesburg introduced an antilynching measure. Two weeks later, the state senate passed the bill by a vote of 32 to 0 with eight abstentions. Although grateful that the Senate had taken a step toward “outlawing this crowning infamy of the century,” the Richmond Planet, a black newspaper, lamented that the legislature had “extracted the teeth” from Byrd’s original proposal by removing the monetary penalty provision. On March 1, the House of Delegates concurred with the Senate’s version by a margin of 74 to 5; a noticeable twenty-one delegates abstained. On March 14, 1928, Byrd signed into law the nation’s strictest antilynching measure and the first that directly termed lynching a state crime. No white person was ever convicted under the statute for committing crimes against an African American. Instead, Virginia’s landmark antilynching law was used only to punish whites for crimes against other whites."

"Incontestably what runs Virginia is the Byrd machine, the most urbane and genteel dictatorship in America. A real machine it is, though Senator Harry Flood Byrd himself faced more opposition in 1946 than at any time in his long, suave, and distinguished public career."

"Senator Harry F. Byrd incarnates the cavalier-First-Family-of-Virginia tradition, except in one important particular. The Byrd family has a heredity like that of a Middle Europe princeling; indeed, for some generations, the ancestral estate at Westover resembled nothing so much as, say, an estate like that of the Potockis' outside Warsaw. Byrd's initial ancestor, William Byrd I, arrived in Virginia in 1674, and he and his son, William Byrd II, were powerful in pre-Revolutionary characters. But early in the nineteenth century the family began to disintegrate. The present Byrd, lacking nothing in aristocratic heritage, did lack something that usually attends an aristocratic heritage- money. The family, grown poor, had scattered; Byrd's father was Texas born, and he himself was born in West Virginia. Yet always the Byrds were tightly enmeshed in the old tradition. At the age of fifteen, young Byrd took over a newspaper in Winchester, Virginia, that for a long time had been unable to make ends meet and put it on its feet. He never had opportunity to go to high school or college. Byrd made the newspaper a successful property, and branched out in other fields; he is a very wealthy man today, and his Shenandoah Valley home, Rosemont, near Berryville, is a Virginia showplace. His fortune derives mostly out of apples. Virginia as a whole is the fourth apple-growing state in the union, and Byrd himself, with 200,000 trees and a million bushel a year crop, is believed to control about 1 percent of all American production. The outline of Byrd's career, especially in its motivations, is strikingly like that of his friend in the Senate, Arthur Vandenberg. Vandenberg also struggled for a living as a young man, as we know, and a consequent impulse toward security has dominated his behavior ever since. In Byrd's life story we may similarly find a characteristic that distinguishes him above anything else- his extreme obsessive hatred of debt, his dogged fixation on economy. He had to struggle for bitter years to get a family property out of debt. Both the United States Senate and the commonwealth of Virginia have seen the results of this transmuted into other spheres."

"Byrd interested himself in politics early, and he became a state senator and then in 1926 governor of Virginia. He is an able man (in industriousness and abstract competence he resembles Taft of Ohio) and his record as governor was in several aspects notable. He fought the gasoline and telephone companies, to drive rates down and thus save the public money; he put through an admirable antilynching bill, the first such bill in the South, making any member of a lynch mob subject to state authority and indictment on a charge of murder. As a result Virginia has not had a lynching for twenty years. Roosevelt liked Byrd at this time and wanted him in the federal Senate; as a result, when Claude A. Swanson was elevated to FDR's cabinet in 1933, Byrd got his Senate seat. He has been a senator ever since. He began to break with Roosevelt when the New Deal got underway, and within a few years had become the most important and powerful of all his enemies among Senate Democrats. For session after session he intransigently bored away at Roosevelt budgets, Roosevelt appropriations, Roosevelt administrative agencies. Yet, a gentleman, he never attacked FDR blatantly. His good manners made him the more dangerous an antagonist. He could not be dismissed as a demagogue or spiteful partisan. At the 1944 Democratic convention, he got eighty-nine votes for the presidential nomination; he was- and still is- the obvious candidate and hero of the Bourbon South that is Democrat in name only. He voted against the party's leadership on 61 percent of all roll calls in sixteen months in 1945-6."

"The Byrd machine is a highly efficient organization; it runs the Commonwealth as effectively as Pendergast ever ran Kansas City or Kelly-Nash Chicago, though with much less noise. In fact, from the point of view of its adhesive power in every Democratic county, its control over practically every office, no matter how minor, it is quite possibly the single most powerful machine surviving in the whole United States. Virginia, I heard it said, is the only "aviary" in the country; it is a cage the netting of which, though almost invisible to outsiders, is extremely close spun; the commonwealth is, so a friend in North Carolina told me- the remark is somewhat bitter- not only the cradle of American democracy, but its "grave." Byrd has never forgtten his Virginia interests. He pays as intimate and inflexible attention to state affairs as to federal. The machine works something like this. Its major instruments are, as always, jobs and patronage, plus the Virginia poll tax. First, through the Democratic National Committee, Byrd controls federal patronage. Next, he pretty well decides the choice not merely of governor, who in Virginia today cannot be other than a Byrd man, in turn controls the appointment of some thousands of state employees, and circuit court judges are chosen- for substantial eight-year terms- by the legislature; these in turn appoint the school trustees, county electoral boards, and trial justices. In each county there is a fixed ring of six or seven machine men. Some county officers like sheriff and tax assessor are elected but their salaries and expense allotments are, within limits, established by the State Compensation Board, also appointed by the governor under Byrd's control. The pattern makes a full interlocking circle. Nothing could be neater or more complete."

"Nevertheless, there was merit in the manner of the man and the portent of his prognostications. His major contribution as a senator was his repeated warning about the dangers of excessive federal spending, a warning that had more substance twenty years after his retirement than it did during the prosperous post-World War II years. There are limits to what government can accomplish, dangers in long-term unbalanced budgets, and liabilities in dependence on the welfare state- for rich and poor alike. Byrd's flaw was that he did not translate these forebodings into imaginative solutions to the problems of modern society but instead fell back on old clichés and a narrow individualistic ethic that was no longer serviceable, a sterile legacy to show for thirty years of service. Harry Byrd's retirement was short-lived. A few months later, as his condition deteriorated, he was diagnosed as having an inoperable brain tumor. He spent his remaining days at Rosemont, mostly bedridden, but not without having one last small impact on Virginia politics. On the eve of his son's reelection bid, he lapsed into a coma, and out of respect for him, the campaign was halted. Days later, Harry Jr. won a narrow victory over Armistead Boothe in the Democratic primary, but Willis Robertson and Howard Smith went down to defeat. The Old Guard had passed. On October 20, 1966, Harry Flood Byrd died in the same room where his wife had died two years earlier. He was buried next to her on a hill overlooking Winchester and the Valley and mountains he loved so much."

"Harry Flood Byrd (1887-1966) was the most powerful political leader in twentieth- century Virginia. He served as governor from 1926 to 1930 and as a United States senator from 1933 to 1965. Byrd's political organization and pay-as-you-go philosophy kept taxes and public spending low in order to make Virginia attractive to business and industrial investors, but as a consequence road construction and support for public education and public health programs remained below national standards. For three decades Byrd's political allies dominated politics in the state. The Byrd organization collapsed following his death and the disastrous attempt by means of Massive Resistance to obstruct federal court orders in the 1950s and 1960s to desegregate the state's public schools."

"Byrd was born out of his time and into the wrong political party."

"HARRY FLOOD BYRD was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia. He attended Shenandoah Valley Academy in Winchester, Virginia, after which he became manager of the Winchester Evening Star in 1902 and later its owner and publisher. He also established the Martinsburg Evening Journal in 1907 and became publisher of the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record in 1923. And while involved in journalism, he became of the largest apple growers east of the Mississippi River. He served in the Virginia State Senate from 1916 to 1925 and as Virginia Fuel Commissioner in 1918. Prior to becoming governor, he was elected chairman of the Democratic State Committee in 1921, following the death of his uncle Hal Flood. During his gubernatorial administration, lynching was made a state crime, subjecting all participants to charges of murder. In addition, the “short ballot” was adopted, limiting the list of individually elected Virginia executive branch officials to governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general. The executive branch was reorganized through the abolishment of more than thirty bureaus and the merger of all activities of state government under twelve departments. And counties were given the sole right to tax land while the state was given the sole right to tax intangible property. Byrd was appointed to a vacancy in the U.S. Senate in 1933, retaining the seat through election until 1965."

"A talented man, Byrd chose to stand outside the broad currents of his time and to set his face against the future... He began as a force and ended as an anachronism."

"When the Supreme Court issued its decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, it overturned one aspect of the carefully constructed system of the racial police state in the South. Virginia did not accept the Supreme Court's decision. Initially, the Virginia governor Lindsay Almond counseled moderation, but the U.S. senator Harry Byrd, who controlled Virginia politics with an iron fist, reacted with fury when he heard Almond would acquiesce to the highest court in the land. "The top blew off the U.S. Capitol," Almond recalled. Byrd announced the state's strategy in 1956: "If we can organize the Southern states for massive resistance order... the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South." Almond was soon on board, declaring, "We will oppose with every facility at our command, and with every ounce of our energy, the attempt being made to mix the white and Negro races in our classrooms." Virginia followed that pronouncement with laws to back up its position, ordering schools to shutter rather than integrate."

"In 1958, Charlottesville and Norfolk schools as well as those in Prince Edward and Warren Counties closed by order of the governor. Thousands of schoolchildren went without education for half a decade so Virginia could, once again, maintain its racial code. The general assembly also created a voucher system using public funds to allow white parents to send their children to private schools. The federal courts ruled the closures and the vouchers unconstitutional, but Harry Byrd would not give up. He tried to persuade Governor Almond to call out the National Guard. One unverified account of the meeting suggests Byrd ordered Almond to shoot children if necessary. Almond allegedly replied, "I'll do it, Harry, if you put it in writing." White supremacists rarely give up their power without a fight. Almond finally relented, and token integration began peacefully in February 1959."

"Before developing a plan to issue bonds to pay for the Interstate System, General Lucius D. Clay might have been better off if he had taken a close look at a key Member of Congress, Senator Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia. If General Clay had done so, the financing mechanism of the Administration's plan probably would have been different. In the 1954 congressional elections, the Republicans lost control of the Senate. Senator Byrd was the new Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which would be responsible for the revenue portion of any legislation emerging from the Senate authorizing the proposed program. As the White House might have predicted, Byrd could be counted on to oppose the Clay Committee's financial proposal. A lifelong highway booster, Senator Byrd was also a lifelong pay-as-you-go man with a nearly pathological hatred of debt, whether personal or public."

"Senator Byrd's final year in Congress would be 1965. His final battle was against the Voting Rights Bill of 1965. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., had dramatized the issue by leading a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest exclusion of blacks from voting. President Johnson used the momentum to seek immediate passage of a bill that would require Federal intervention in States that used poll taxes, literacy tests, and other means to exclude black voters. Byrd considered the bill "vicious" and "iniquitous in effect and contemptible in design." In August, over his protests, the bill was enacted."

"Harry Byrd and his organizations were rich and valuable parts of any southern uniqueness of history and humanity. Byrd was born of the somber side of southern history. His organization, notwithstanding its faults, was truly coined from the mint of its time. If it was parsimonious, it emerged from a period when Virginia had little of which to give. If it feared deficits, it remembered the state's staggering Reconstruction debts. If it was oligarchic, it was so by reason of long inheritance. If it was regionally oriented, it bore still the scarred tissue of the Civil War. If it was rurally flavored, it respected the power of the farmer's franchise and the state's agrarian heritage. If it was slow- too slow- to change, Virginia had long been changeless."

"There are those who end life feeling the future will nourish their cause. There are those also whose causes pass with themselves. Harry Byrd's cause belonged to the latter category. In the nation a more positive role for federal government was fast becoming an American political axiom; likewise, Harry Byrd's Virginia would soon seem but yesteryear's quaint and curious memento. But Byrd's personal cause- his honesty, courtesy, in short, his humanity- was not tied to time. The greatest men have often urged dated or debatable specifics. George Washington urged against foreign alliances; Thomas Jefferson dreamed of an agrarian utopia; Woodrow Wilson warred against bigness in American life; Robert E. Lee struggled valiantly for a divided nation. History values men as much for what they are for as for what they espouse. Let not its view of balanced budgets determine its judgment of Harry Byrd."

"I wasn't there, Julie, and I certain can't speak for Delegate Tran, but I would tell you, one, the first thing I would say is this is why decisions such as this should be made by providers, physicians, and the mothers and the fathers that are involved. When we talk about third-trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of obviously the mother, with the consent of the physicians, more than one physician, by the way. And it's done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus that's non-viable. So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that's what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother. So I think this was really blown out of proportion. But again, we want the government not to be involved in these kinds of decisions. We want the decisions to be made by the mothers and the providers and this is why, Julie, that legislators, most of whom are men by the way, shouldn't be telling a woman what she should and shouldn't be doing with her body. His spokesman later released a statement saying "No woman seeks a third trimester abortion except in the case of tragic or difficult circumstances, such as a nonviable pregnancy or in the event of severe fetal abnormalities, and the governor’s comments were limited to the actions physicians would take in the event that a woman in those circumstances went into labor."

"This country is once again looking to Virginia to lead the way. Let us lead with humility and optimism, telling the truth, learning from history and removing every obstacle to progress for all Virginians. Let us rely on the compass we all carry to show us the way ahead. I ask you to join me. Let’s get to work."

"When we make decisions, we’ll apply this test. • Does this action do the most good for the most Virginians? • Have we been transparent with the public about what we are doing and why we are doing it? • And finally, is there a better way forward that we haven’t yet considered?"

"The path to progress is marked by honest give and take among people who truly want to make life better for those around them."

"It can be hard to find our way in a time when there’s so much shouting, when nasty, shallow tweets take the place of honest debate, and when scoring political points gets in the way of dealing with real problems. If you’ve felt that way, I want you to listen to me right now: We are bigger than this. We all have a moral compass deep in our hearts. And it’s time to summon it again, because we have a lot of work to do."