The Virginia Public Safety Committee advanced a sweeping slate of firearms regulation, criminal justice, and military affairs bills on January 30th, with the most substantive debate centering on HB 286, the National Guard Integrity and Democracy Protection Act, which passed 14-5 after testimony from multiple proponents and a neutral warning from the Virginia Department of Military Affairs that the bill could breach federal cooperative agreements. Contested firearms bills — covering assault weapons, ghost guns, firearm storage, and gun buyback programs — consistently passed along party-line margins of 12-6 to 13-6, while several criminal justice bills drew narrower opposition when pulled from an otherwise unanimous block vote.
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Alexis Bullshrey of the Virginia Department of Military Affairs testified that the bill 'would constitute a breach of contract of those cooperative agreements,' confirmed through the federal program manager for facilities, and noted that 230 of 263 state facilities fall under such agreements, with 116 being 100% federally paid and state owned. Delegate Helmer countered that the provision applies only in the narrow circumstance where a mobilization is found illegal by the OAG or Governor — characterizing it as equivalent to blocking 'an invasion' — and the committee chair pushed back on the breach claim, stating 'I've always been under the impression since I got through law school that a contract that requires you to perform an illegal act is against public policy and wouldn't be a breach.'
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“I never thought we'd be in the position where this would be the subject of discussion, but governors on a bipartisan basis have expressed alarm and concern about the deployments of National Guard in California and Illinois, D.C. and we have seen firsthand what has happened with federal overreach in Minnesota over the last few weeks, to great sadness for many of us.”
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Sign in to subscribeGood morning. Welcome to the. What is it, January 29th? No, today's January 30th. Anyway, calling this meeting of Public Safety to order. Members will record their attendance on the electronic voting board. All right. The clerk will close, the roll quorum is present. All right, so here's what we're going to do today, just to give you guys the order of March. We're going to first get a subcommittee report from a Public Safety 2 subcommittee. Then we're going to take bills from Public Safety from the Firearms subcommittee that need to go to Appropriations. We'll take those up. There's a chance we don't get through the whole docket this morning, which is fine. We can carry some stuff. Anything doesn't get done, we can move over to next week. But the things that have to go to Appropriations, we want to make sure we get through today and get them to the appropriators as soon as possible so they can work on that. So we'll do Public Safety one, I'm sorry, Public Safety two, Firearms Appropriations. Then we'll go to the bill that's before us, assuming the patron shows up, and then we'll come back and we'll do…
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