
Text: McDonnell’s State of the Commonwealth Address
Gov. Bob McDonnell delivers the 2013 State of the Commonwealth Address to the Virgnia General Assembly.

Gov. Bob McDonnell delivers the 2013 State of the Commonwealth Address to the Virgnia General Assembly.

With legislators and transportation leaders by his side, Gov. Bob McDonnell announced on Tuesday a plan that would provide more than $3.1 billion in transportation funding for the Commonwealth over the next five years, tying transportation funding to economic growth and replacing the state’s outdated gas tax revenue model with a 0.8 percent increase in the state’s sales tax dedicated to transportation.

As you may know, on New Year’s Day, the House of Representatives received a proposal from the United States Senate regarding the actions it wished to take to address the fiscal cliff. While I was pleased that the Senate finally offered a proposal of its own to address this crisis, I was disappointed that our colleagues in the Senate waited until the last minute and sent us a proposal that does not address our spending problem.

The House of Representatives voted 257-167 late Tuesday to approve a bipartisan compromise leaving in place tax cuts for individuals with incomes less than $400,000 and families with incomes less than $450,000 and delays automatic spending cuts for two months.

The National Rifle Association pledged to offer “meaningful contributions” to make sure that school shootings like the one last week in Newtown, Conn., that took the lives of 26, including 20 first-graders, would never happen again. Those “contributions” took on a familiar form on Friday, with the gun-rights lobby attacking gun-control laws and unveiling a plan to placed armed guards in every school in America.

Gov. Bob McDonnell’s proposed budget for the 2013 General Assembly session includes what the administration is terming “significant additional support” for veteran’s issues, including more than $2 million in funding.

Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) on Wednesday voiced strong support for the conference report of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013. The legislation was reported out of the Senate-House conference committee last night and is expected to pass both houses of Congress this week.

As cracks form among CEOs and Republican Members of Congress over their hardline anti-tax position in the fiscal showdown, religious leaders from across the ideological spectrum have been united in supporting new revenue over additional spending cuts. And they’re speaking for their people. A strong majority of religious Americans favor letting the Bush tax cuts for the richest two percent of Americans expire. Even reliably conservative groups, such as white evangelical Protestants, are evenly divided on the issue.

The U.S. Supreme Court announced on Friday that it will hear a challenge to the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, a 1996 law targeting same-sex couples for discriminatory treatment under federal law.

Late Thursday, the U.S. Senate unanimously approved an amendment offered by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) to reaffirm the United States’ commitment to Japan under Article V of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, and to firmly counter any attempts to challenge Japan’s administration of the Senkaku Islands.