Last night in Virginia Beach, journalist Roland Martin hosted the first forum of Virginia House Democrats’ “Our Voices, Our Vote” GOTV speaker series. See below for video of the forum, which featured Virginia House Democratic Leader Don Scott, plus Democratic House of Delegates candidates Kelly Convirs-Fowler, Phil Hernandez, Alex Askew and Michael Feggans. As Leader Scott said last night:
“In the House of Delegates…Republicans have had the majority for 22 of the last 24 years, so they’ve been really running the gamut for a long time. So a lot of the issues and things that we see today around underfunding public schools, we can put it at the feet of the Republican Party because they have had the purse strings..If we get the majority, we have an opportunity to make some historic investments…If you don’t vote, you voted by not voting, because you’ve given away your voice to somebody else. And so we have a responsibility to participate. I tell these kids all the time, they’re like, ‘oh they’re all the same’ – no we’re not! It’s a big difference. There are some people that want to do things for you to make things better and there’s some people that want to do things against you to make things worse. And we need to pay attention to that…I think we have an opportunity an historic opportunity here to make sure that we fund our our public education, make sure that we get these guns off the street – we have a a gun violence epidemic here in the Commonwealth of Virginia and we have Republicans that want to take us backwards on gun violence…the Republicans tried to repeal [red-flag laws]; we raised the minimum wage, the Republicans tried to repeal that. Don’t even get me started on what they want to do with women’s reproductive healthare – they want to tell women what to do with their own bodies. I never thought that I would live in a world where my 88-year-old mother will have more rights than my 14-year-old daughter. And we need to do something about that; we need everybody now to step up right now because they will take us backward, they’ve proven that…There are people who want to take us backwards, that is their theme. Anytime you have a governor who comes in and says that Martin Luther King Jr is too controversial to teach our kids, we have a problem…We already know what they want to do – anything related to teaching Black history in a way that is meaningful and substantive, they want to remove it, they want to take us backwards…teacher tip lines where they turn parents against teachers…having children snitching on their teachers in the classroom, it all…undermine[s] public education…undermine[s] parents’ confidence in public education…I’m asking each and every person come out and vote like your life depends on it – because it does.”
Well said as always by Virginia House Democratic Leader Don Scott!
Sign up for the Blue Virginia weekly newsletter
