RICHMOND, Va. -- Governor Glenn Youngkin barnstormed around Virginia on Thursday, speaking with Virginians about his focus for the second half of the General Assembly.
This year's session reached Crossover Day on Wednesday, where bills had to pass out of their respective chambers to be considered by the other.
Speaking to a crowd in a Chesterfield restaurant on Thursday, Governor Glenn Youngkin laid out his focus for the second half of this year's General Assembly session.
"Today, we're cutting taxes," Youngkin said.
Taxes were one of the key focal points of Youngkin's campaign. Among his goals is eliminating the grocery tax, a one-time tax refund and doubling the standard deduction for state income tax.
"This is our chance to cut taxes and increase some spending in the most important areas. And we can do both right now because of the size of the surplus," Youngkin said.
The fate of those tax initiatives lies with a split assembly.
The Republican-controlled House passed bills while the Democrat-controlled Senate referred the deduction bill to next year and only partially removed the grocery tax.
The House passed other Youngkin-backed bills on topics like voting and education.
"We've made good on the promises we made last year to the voters. We made our schools and communities safer again," Speaker of the House Todd Gilbert said.
But in the Senate, Democrats shot down many of those ideas, including the banning of teaching "divisive concepts".
"I think we've done a very effective job in preserving the progress that we've made in the last two years," Senator Ghazala Hashmi said.
However, the chambers have reached an agreement on a few issues already, including emergency legislation signed on Wednesday that ended mask mandates in schools.
Republicans said they are hoping to find common ground on tax reform and charter or innovation schools. Democrats said they see bipartisan support in addressing staffing shortages in the medical field and addressing teacher pay.
One topic that needs discussion is a Senate bill that would move up some retail sales of marijuana to September of this year instead of in 2024.
"We need to make sure, not only are we setting up the regulatory structure effectively for marijuana, but also that there is the lens of equity attached to it," Hashmi said.
Republicans have criticized Democrats for legalization possession without having a regulatory framework in place and say they'll see what can be done.
Youngkin said that while he has concerns, he won't overturn legalization and wants to see what lawmakers end up with.
"This industry itself has to be set up in a way that is going to, if we're going to have it, it needs to be successful," Youngkin said.
"There are some places where clearly, the governor had some compromise wins," CBS6 political analyst Dr. Bob Holsworth said.
Dr. Holsworth said the session has played out as he expected with the split chambers and the second half will focus heavily on budget negotiations.
"And it'll be interesting to see whether the assembly can actually get out of town on time or whether the session extends beyond the predicted period, largely because the differences in these two budgets are unlikely to be significant," Dr. Holsworth said.
