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Health & Fitness

The View From Over Here

                    Senator Chap Peterson--Working in the Public Interest

          During a mostly unproductive session in Richmond, I’ve noticed one state Senator genuinely working to make the Senate work better for the people.  His initiatives could, if his colleagues were to follow his lead, reduce the stench of the pay-to-play corruption and could make legislation more open, accessible to his constituents and all of us.                                                                                     The man doing this largely unnoticed work is J. Chapman (Chap) Petersen. Senator Petersen represents the neighboring 34th Senate District of Virginia which stretches from Annandale to Centreville, and includes the Town of Vienna and City of Fairfax.  From 2001 to 2007, he served in the House of Delegates before being elected to the Virginia Senate where he is in his second 4-year term.  In other words, he has worked the Richmond circuit long enough to be in the typical groove--the groove where energy and imagination slip, fundraising/re-election campaigning are the raison d’etre  and taking gifts from special interests is habit.                                                                                                                        Chap doesn’t fit the mold.  To begin with, he wears colorful bowties that make him stand out.  Something else that sets him apart, to the point of irritating many of his in-the-groove colleagues, is his fixation with making legislation clear and comprehensible to even non-lawyers and non-legislators.  Folks like you and me!  He sets high standards with bills he writes, but worse yet, he is known to edit and clean up bills written by others.  And, with good reason!  A recent (March 4) Washington Post story included examples of language in actual Senate bills that is simply unintelligible—e.g., one sentence that went on for 10 lines, and no matter how many times I read it, made no sense.                                                          Mr. Petersen rightly believes that laws should be clear and precise, and neither deliberately vague for “flexibility” or unintelligible to the average civilian.  He’s got an uphill battle in a place where clarity and precision are not valued.  A tip of the Lovaas cap to Chap, working to make laws accessible to all.                           Chap also stands out in the crowd when it comes to ethics. Last year, he was the first to publicly criticize and call for the resignation of then-Governor and chief gift scrounger Bob McDonnell.  He followed up by proposing a sweeping reform of the rules governing gift taking–including barring any gift over $100 for legislators and their families, tightening and expediting disclosure of contributions, and setting up an independent oversight office with power to monitor and enforce the new rules.  When his colleagues finally got around to ethics “reform”, following the McDonnells’ indictments, they passed a watered down “compromise” with ZERO enforcement.  Dem. Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw (a marquee advertisement for term limits in my view) had no time for ethics reform.  Rather than work on ethics, Saslaw used the time to call the prosecutor in the McDonnell case to give his personal character reference for ex-Governor Sleaze.  I salute Sen. Petersen’s fighting to change the swamp’s culture.                                                                                                                      While Chap Petersen is less liberal than I, we agree on many things.  We do part ways on a few important matters—e.g., he opposes a woman’s right to make her own reproductive decisions.  But, I wholeheartedly appreciate and admire his lonely work for the public interest as outlined above.  He is also less beholden to special interests than his colleagues.  For example, he gets the bare minimum wage--$1,000 in campaign cash-- and zero in gifts annually from Dominion Power which owns the legislature and doles out much more cash and goodies, like $250 luxury box Redskin tickets, to nearly every other legislator.                                                                                                          The View from over here--We need Senator Petersen in the Senate leadership.

 

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