Virginia
At task force meeting, military families rip ‘ugly side of Virginia’s government’ • Virginia Mercury
Kristen Fenty of Virginia Beach says her daughter Lauren only got one moment of physical proximity to the father she never got a chance to know. It happened when she was a baby, still small enough to be lifted onto her father’s casket.
As a room full of government officials listened Monday, Fenty told the group that her daughter — who was 28 days old in 2006 when her dad, Lt. Col. Joe Fenty, was killed in a helicopter crash — is now 18, preparing to go to college and hoping to eventually go to medical school.
But a tuition waiver program Fenty assumed would help pay for her daughter’s education, the Virginia Military Survivors and Dependents Education Program, has been thrown into limbo due to state leaders’ controversial efforts to cut the program’s growing costs.
“Societies that do not share the cost of war topple,” Fenty said, adding that she hopes the Virginia General Assembly will “right this wrong.”
At the first meeting of a bipartisan task force Gov. Glenn Youngkin convened to study the VMSDEP program and its growing financial impact on Virginia’s public higher education system, Youngkin administration officials and General Assembly members said they were committed to listening to military families and see their well-being as a top policy priority. Fenty was one of several military spouses and veterans selected to serve on the task force, which she called “both an honor and an agony.”
Over the course of several hours Monday afternoon at the Virginia War Memorial building in Richmond, public officials mostly took a rhetorical beating from military veterans and Gold Star spouses who said they felt betrayed by an insular, out-of-touch political class.
“These past two months have shown me the ugly side of Virginia’s government,” said task force member Donna Lewis, a mother of three whose husband was killed in combat in Iraq. “Countless senators and delegates we met with said they were told the impact on our families would be minimal.”
Lewis said she hoped the task force would be productive, but was skeptical after watching what she called “institutional betrayal in its highest form.”
General Assembly leaders have pointed to data showing the VMSDEP program, which provides tuition waivers to spouses and children of military members killed or permanently disabled as a result of their service, has grown exponentially over the last five years. With VMSDEP beneficiaries essentially given the opportunity to go to college for free, some Virginia universities have raised concerns that they can’t continue absorbing the costs of enrolling a growing number of VMSDEP beneficiaries that don’t pay tuition. Those added costs, some policymakers have argued, will ultimately be felt by taxpayers at large or by tuition-paying students who might have less ability to pay than families receiving military benefits.
According to data presented by state officials, VMSDEP participation has grown by nearly 350% over the last five years, jumping from 1,400 students in 2019 to 6,400 in 2023.
The revised program imposes a stricter Virginia residency requirement, prevents the waivers from being used for advanced degrees or a second undergraduate degree and requires participants to first pursue other forms of financial aid and only use VMSDEP for remaining costs.
The attempted trimming of the program enraged military veterans and their families, who have bristled at the idea they’re becoming a burden on public universities that they say don’t seem particularly hard up for cash. Supporters of the VMSDEP program also contend it’s a benefit earned through the sacrifices of adults and children alike and shouldn’t be tied to a family’s ability to pay like other forms of financial aid. Policymakers’ attempts to shield current VMSDEP beneficiaries from the changes fell short, the critics argue, by being unclear and leaving many families uncertain about their status.
The General Assembly is already planning to reconvene later this month to undo the changes to the VMSDEP program and take a closer look at its eligibility rules and how they could be reformed. The task force, made up of General Assembly members, cabinet officials, higher education officials, veteran services officials and military families themselves, is supposed to be studying VMSDEP and issuing recommendations for the 2025 legislative session.
“You have made numbers come alive,” Youngkin Secretary of Education Aimee Guidera told the crowd at the conclusion of Monday’s meeting. “And that’s what matters. And it’s emotional.”
House of Delegates leaders have specified their chamber will return on June 28 and intend to fully reverse the VMSDEP changes. Speaking with reporters after Monday’s meeting, House Appropriations Chairman Luke Torian, D-Prince William, said he and others who supported the VMSDEP changes had sincere concerns about the program’s growth and were trying to look out for the state’s best interests.
“Obviously, from what we’re hearing, it went sideways,” Torian said. “We’re going to move forward. We’re going to address the concerns.”
The plan for the state Senate is less clear, but Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, said the Senate expects to announce more detail later this week.
Senate Finance and Appropriations Chair Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, attended Monday’s task force meeting virtually and gave only brief introductory remarks.
“There is no stronger supporter of our military families than I am,” said Lucas.
The task force was part of Youngkin’s response to a furor that erupted when the VMSDEP changes were included in a bipartisan budget deal approved on May 13. Though changes to VMSDEP were on the table in the General Assembly’s regular session, the final budget deal was mostly crafted behind closed doors and approved quickly.
At the time, both parties were eager to get the overdue budget done and avert the prospect of a government shutdown come July 1. But Youngkin, who signed the budget, and the General Assembly, which passed it by a wide margin, are now under pressure to come back before July 1 to reverse the VMSDEP changes and restore the program to its former state.
The task force’s first meeting mostly focused on introductions and taking public comment, almost all of which was infused with indignation at the officials listening from the other side of the table.
Jason Redman, a former U.S. Navy Seal and Old Dominion University graduate who was badly wounded in Iraq, said people signing up for military service are given assurances that, if the worst happens, their loved ones will be taken care of.
“You’re saying that it is too hard to sustain this program to families that have buried a loved one for your freedom,” Redman said. “To warriors who have endured loss of limb, eyesight, function, disfigurement and permanent disability. … This is appalling.”
Brian Smith, a military veteran who said he now works as an eighth grade civics teacher, said that during his service he could never make promises to his daughter that he would be there for any particular holiday or birthday. Expecting VMSDEP to cover college costs, he said, was a promise he thought could be kept.
“What lesson am I taking back to my eighth graders about government?,” he said. “Can you help me out with that?”
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Virginia
Everything From Virginia Tech’s Ethan Gibson, Henry Cooke After Monday’s NCAA Tournament Selection Show
Following Selection Monday’s selection show, where Virginia Tech qualified for its first Regional appearance since the 2022 season, Virginia Tech infielder Ethan Gibson and catcher Henry Cooke spoke to the media virtually. Here is the entirety of what the pair had to say:
Ethan Gibson
On the initial reaction to learning that the team was headed to Los Angeles:
“Definitely pumped up, excited for the opportunity to play. Here’s another day to play baseball, so until you get 10 minutes at a time, like Tyson [Petersheim] said, and have fun with it.”
On the impact for Gibson and Cooke to play postseason baseball for the first time at the college level:
“Definitely a dream come true. Worked hard, all of us coaches and players, everybody around us. It’s been a fun journey and a fun ride, so hopefully just keep doing what we can do and being where our feet are.”
Q: What’s your kind of first initial reaction, seeing that you might have to play a team as good as UCLA is this year?
“Just the same as any other game. still baseball, we’ve been playing it for a while, so we’re just going to keep doing that.”
On Ethan Ball:
“Definitely awesome to see his success. He deserves it. One of the hardest workers I know. Always comes up big for us. So, just playing with him, hanging out with him outside of the field, just a great dude, got a great family. So it’s definitely been a fun ride with him, watching him kind of grow and develop into the player that he is, and knowing that he’s gonna continue getting better, and he’s gonna be a really good player.”
On Hudson Lutterman persevering through injury:
“Definitely a gritty dude. I think the thing that kind of surrounds this team is nuts, guts, and grit. So, watching him do that doesn’t surprise me at all. Also, one of the hardest workers I know, hard to slow that fellow down. So, it’s been awesome to watch him, and he continues to do great things. So, it’s awesome.”
On the feeling of seeing Virginia Tech up on the screen:
“It was cool. I hadn’t seen that since me being here, so being able to experience that and experience it with some of my best buddies was definitely awesome. Something I’ll remember for the rest of my life, for sure.”
Q: So, did everyone play it cool, or was everyone going nuts?
“No, we were excited. We definitely celebrated. So ready to go.”
On what makes this team so good that it’s the first team in Gibson’s tenure (last appearance: 2022) to make NCAAs:
“Nuts, guts and grit, that’s what I’d say… I got that one from my dad, so that what I would say. Put hard work in there, as well. But definitely a gritty bunch of dudes.”
On the gratification after the low points of the season:
My dad told me a long time ago, you can never get too low, and you never get too high, so just stay even-kell. I think that’s what we did. I don’t think there’s ever a time where we were like panicking. We were just like, just gotta come together and play. We know we have talent, and we know we can definitely shock some people. And just control what we can control and have fun with it.”
On what Gibson thinks getting back to the tournament means for the coaches:
“Definitely rewarding. They work just as hard as us, if not harder. So, seeing the smile on their face, but knowing the work’s not done, it was a surreal feeling. So, ready to go out there, take care of business, and do what we can do.”
On how cool it’s going to be to see Brett Renfrow pitching in a regional for the first time:
“It’d be awesome. Been here with him for three years, known him far longer than that. So, just watching him and knowing all the work he’s put in, as well as the guys beside him, it’ll be awesome. So, I can’t wait.”
Henry Cooke
On the initial reaction to learning that the team was headed to Los Angeles:
“It was excitement just to know that we worked all year for this moment, and yeah, they are the No. 1 seed. But we feel like if we play our best baseball and pitch the best we can and hit like we’ve been hitting, I feel like we can beat anybody, so let’s just go out there and prove ourselves.”
On Szefc remarking that there was surprise in the room at the travel distance and whether Cooke saw that:
“I didn’t think we’d be going out to California or anything like that, but I knew we’d have to travel somewhere. But it’ll be fun going out there again for the second time this year.”
On what a day like today means given the low points of the team this season:
“It’s amazing. I’ve wanted to make a regional ever since I’ve been here. I mean, we’ve been close. And then a bunch of injuries has happened, so not having a full healthy team the whole season hurts your chances of making one. But everybody pretty much stayed healthy for this year and helped us out. A lot of things went into making this regional.”
On how badly Cooke wanted to make a regional:
“Bad. Giving another chance, another week to play, and it’s just hopefully we get another week after this to play.”
On the benefit of prior travel to California from May 1-3:
It’s a lot. We now know how the time changes affect us, and when we need to fall asleep in order to not affect us as much. So, just having that under our boat’s been pretty good.”
On the importance of winning series finales vs. Georgia Tech, UVa. and Miami:
“It was huge. Those series, we didn’t play our best first two games, but every single one of those series, we went out and played our best on a Sunday. It’s huge taking those away. When you add them up at the end of the year, as long as you have 15, it’s a good chance you’re in.”
On the emotional gratification of rounding out his career with, at minimum, an NCAA Regional:
“It’s good. I mean, it’s why I came here, and it’s why I’m pretty sure everybody on the team came here was to go to compete in the postseason.”
On if the team is excited to play in Los Angeles after playing at Berkeley (Northern California) in early May:
“Yeah, hopefully it’s a lot warmer there. It was kind of chilly in Northern California.”
On what makes this year’s team good:
“We’re so tight-knit, and everybody likes everybody. It’s just like we know we have the talent to do whatever is ahead of us, and whatever games, it’s just putting it together and playing together on the field and not being selfish.”
On why this team is different than years past that’s led to the first regional berth since ’22:
“Like I said before, the injuries. 2024, we had something special, and we had a bunch of our pitchers get injured. If that didn’t happen, I think we would have hosted a regional if that stuff didn’t happen. It’s just now, it’s coming together, and everybody’s playing for each other.”
On if there’s any part of the mentality of this unit that hasn’t been prevalent in previous teams:
“No, I mean every single team I’ve been on [at Virginia Tech], it’s just been just like this one, it’s just a matter of fact of injuries, like that’s the only thing I can really give you.”
On the impact of the Georgia Tech series finale — Virginia Tech is the only ACC team to beat the Yellow Jackets at Atlanta:
“It was huge looking at it now, but we never really thought about it once it passed. Once we got past it, it was just the next game.”
On what it’ll be like seeing Renfrow and Griffin Stieg pitch in NCAA Regionals for the first time:
“It’s gonna be huge. I’m excited to see how they do. I know Brett’s gonna be nails… gonna give us a good start, so just see how it’s gonna pan out.”
On Gibson’s “nuts, guts and grit” mantra and how that mentality has helped the team rally:
“That’s the first time I’ve heard that saying, haven’t really heard that saying much, but that’s basically all we’re made of, is just what he said. So, it’s been good, just being tough. We try to go into the same game with every mindset, just being tough outs and being tough on the mound, just being tough all the way around.”
Q: How have you seen Hudson sort of be emblematic on that? At the ACC tournament, he’s kind of limping around on the ankle, even as he’s ripping a double.
“Yeah, that’s the definition of this team, and Huddy, he sprained his ankle two weeks ago, but he’s back on in the Clemson series. Then DHs in the ACC tournament. That’s what we are.”
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Exactly one year and six days ago, the Prospect posted a piece I’d just written about Colorado’s Jared Polis, under the headline “The Democrats’ One and Only Union-Busting Governor.”
As of a couple weeks ago, that headline is no longer accurate. Polis is still a union-buster and even more out of sync with Colorado Democrats, who’ve just formally censured him for complying with President Trump’s demand to commute the sentence of Tina Peters, the county clerk who’d been convicted for enabling a Trump acolyte to illegally access and copy the hard drives from her county’s voting machines in an effort to prove that Trump had actually won the 2020 election.
More from Harold Meyerson
But Polis no longer holds that “one and only” status when it comes to Democratic governors who bust unions. Two weeks ago, Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger did just that by vetoing a bill that would have given Virginia’s public-sector workers the right to bargain collectively.
The parallels with Polis are almost uncanny. In Colorado, every Democrat in each house of the legislature had voted for a bill that would have ended the state’s somewhat anomalous “right-to-work” status. (Colorado’s law, dating from 1943, says that once a union wins majority support in a recognition election, it then has to win 75 percent support in a second election to be permitted to collect dues from members.) Every Republican voted against. Siding with the Republicans, Polis vetoed the bill.
In Virginia, state employees have no right to bargain collectively, while municipal employees have had that right since 2021, but only in cities that grant them those rights (which number roughly a dozen). Like Colorado’s “right-to-work” law, Virginia’s ban dates from the 1940s—but unlike Colorado, at that point Virginia was still under the thumb of Jim Crow white supremacist rule. The ban was explicitly racist, motivated by the prospect of a racially integrated union at one public hospital. This spring’s vote on the bill to grant public employees the right to unionize and bargain also split, like Colorado’s, exactly on party lines, with 61 House Democrats voting yes and 35 Republicans voting no, with no crossovers, while in the Senate, the tally was 20 Democrats voting yes and 18 Republicans voting no, again with no crossovers. And like Polis, Spanberger sided with the Republicans and vetoed the bill.
Spanberger insists she’s OK with collective bargaining in theory, just not in practice. To those ends, she sought to have the bill amended. Where the legislature’s bill required government agencies to bargain with their workers’ union once a majority of workers had voted to certify that union as their representative, Spanberger’s amendment merely permitted government agencies to bargain if they so chose, and unlike the legislature’s bill, her amendments also didn’t require even those government agencies that opted to grant workers bargaining rights to bargain over wages and working conditions. Her amendments also specifically denied bargaining rights to workers at the state’s Port Authority and its universities (faculty, staff, teaching and research assistants, as well as university hospital staff) and delayed applying the law to local governments until January 1, 2030—the day that Spanberger will be termed out of office.
In addition to the amendments she formally proposed, sources tell me that she also floated another one that would have required unions to win a majority of the votes of all the workers in the agency they sought to unionize, not just a majority of those who voted. That this is the substance of a new Florida law enacted at the insistence of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis apparently didn’t keep Spanberger’s people from testing this out with some Democratic legislators, who instantly shot it down. Nor were her people embarrassed by the fact that, like almost all American elected officials, Spanberger had won office with the backing of nowhere near a majority of all voting-age constituents. (The population of voting-age Virginians is roughly 6,930,000; when Spanberger was elected last November—with enough votes to defeat her opponent by a robust 15 percentage points—she won 1,976,857 votes, or just 28.5 percent of the total number of voting-age Virginians.)
Virginia’s Democratic legislators refused to include Spanberger’s amendments in the bill, since they clearly understood those amendments would effectively negate just about everything their bill would do. On May 14, Spanberger vetoed the bill, stunning not just the legislators but the union members who’d campaigned for her just six months before—not least because she promised first responders that she would support such a bill during the campaign.
To be sure, Spanberger has signed other pro-worker legislation since she took office in January. That includes a raise in the state’s minimum wage and the establishment of paid family leave. What apparently crosses the line for her, as it does for Polis, who also governs a state that boasts a number of worker benefits, is worker power: the ability of workers to advocate for themselves without fear of being penalized for it, much less being found in violation of the law for doing so.
Exactly who Spanberger is trying to ingratiate herself with by her veto is somewhat mysterious. A 2020 poll of Virginia voters found that they favored granting collective-bargaining rights to public employes by a 68 percent to 25 percent margin. A number of recent nationwide polls have found unions’ approval ratings at their highest level—roughly 65 to 70 percent—since the 1960s. Our corporate behemoths, as well as smaller business, remain fanatically opposed to unions, as do such corporate shills as Jeff Bezos’s mouthpieces recently inflicted on the readers of The Washington Post’s editorial pages—who’ve applauded Spanberger’s opposition to worker power.
Spanberger is perfectly free to curry the support of Bezos’s sock puppets, of course. But at a time when virtually every Democratic official insists that the party focus on rebuilding its ties to the working class, the kind of opposition to worker power that Polis and now Spanberger have demonstrated should completely disqualify them both from any higher office, at least on the Democratic ticket. Democrats who walked precincts for Spanberger last year, only to discover that she’s well to the right of Josh Hawley on the question of their rights as workers, should walk away—make that, run away—from her now.
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (WAVY) — Douglas Shepp McCain, the eldest son of late Sen. John McCain, died suddenly at 66 on May 20, 2026, according to his obituary.
McCain was born on October 4, 1959, in Pensacola, Florida. He enjoyed surfing, baseball, and soccer. In 1997, he graduated from Jacksonville Episcopal High School.
Afterward, McCain attended the University of Virginia, where he majored in Systems Engineering, pledged SAE, participated in Navy ROTC, and then met his future bride, Ashley Jardine McCain.
After graduating, McCain joined the Navy to learn to fly, spending six years flying A-6 Intruders before beginning a long career with American Airlines. He then excelled and found work he truly loved, especially after being made captain.
Those who knew McCain said that he could always be counted on to tell you what he knew and, more often than not, explain why he was right.
He was also described as a loyal friend to many, and that he cherished each and every friendship that he had.
McCain was a devoted son and a loving father to Caroline McCain Hendrickson and Douglas Shepp McCain Jr., and recently found great joy in being Teddy’s grandfather.
His peers will remember him for his generous heart, his loyal friendships and his unwavering love for his family.
Private services will be held for his family. On Saturday, May 30, from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m., a memorial gathering will be held at the Princess Anne Country Club in Virginia Beach.
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