Staunton voters elected a left-leaning City Council in the 2024 cycle, the message sent being, we need to undo the mistake made in 2020, when voters, shockingly, elected a MAGA majority to lead city government.
That MAGA Staunton City Council sure did a number on the Queen City – most notably, running off the city manager, whose sin was having been hired by the liberals.
The replacement hired by the MAGAs, Leslie Beauregard, is still in the city manager job.
The most important department under her purview, the Staunton Police Department, still operates as if the MAGAs are running the city.
The Staunton Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office, headed up by a separately elected so-called constitutional officer, runs more like the Trump DOJ than a city prosecutor’s office serving a left-of-center local community.
The approach of the City Council that the voters put into office last November to doing something to correct for all of this has been to …
I don’t know.
I assume they’re aware, that they’ve seen the political protest rallies gathered downtown over the past several months, that they know local thugs have targeted the local residents pushing for change, that the police department and Commonwealth’s attorney have taken a hands-off approach to the thugs trying to suppress free speech.
ICYMI
If they’re not aware of what’s been going on literally in the heart of their city, it’s time to resign, post haste.
If they are, and their response is, don’t want to rock the boat, it’s also time to resign, post haste.
We just endured four years of not rocking the boat at the federal level from the feckless Biden administration, which almost didn’t get to be, if the coup that Trump and his MAGA loyalists attempted on a certain Jan. 6 had been able to catch even a minor break.
One example of how to deal with a billionaire trying to overthrow an elected government is what you’re seeing in Brazil, where authorities arrested the former president, Jair Bolsonaro, for masterminding a coup plot to remain in office despite his defeat in the 2022 election.
Another is what we saw from Biden, who, in the spirit of post-Civil War reconciliation efforts that ended with the beginning of a century of Jim Crow racial segregation in the U.S. South, directed his attorney general, Merrick Garland, to pump the brakes on investigating Jan. 6.
Want to know why we’re in the state that we’re in as a country now, that’s why: Biden trusted the process.
Staunton leaders appear to be making the same mistake; hey, we’re in control, so, sure, the city manager that the MAGAs put in office to do their bidding is still in the job, but she works for us now, the police department goes out of its way to protect political thugs at the expense of the rights of the majority of our residents, and the vast majority of tourists who come here, which is how we survive as a city, but whatever, it’s all good.
ICYMI
Feckless.
There’s no City Council election this fall, though there is an election for Commonwealth’s attorney.
Don’t get too excited about that one: one of the two candidates is the chief deputy in the office; the other is a former assistant CA in Staunton.
Might be that the best option in that race is undervoting, or writing in Mickey Mouse, as a protest.
As for how to get City Council to get off its collective arse, between now and the next City Council election in November 2026, the best course of action would be, showing up at City Council meetings, and reminding the seven elected officials sitting up on the dais that they’re not up there for their good looks.
And when I say, showing up, I don’t mean, a couple of people here and there.
Remember how the Second Amendment sanctuary folks flooded the City Council chambers in the pre-COVID months of 2020?
Yeah, that.
And for god’s sake, stop asking for permission before you do anything.
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Chris Graham
