Our Beliefs
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Our labor unions... have raised wages, shortened hours, and provided supplemental benefits. Through collective bargaining and grievance procedures, they have brought justice and democracy to the shop floor. But their work goes beyond their own jobs... They have spoken, not for narrow self-interest, but for the public interest and for the people.
-JFK
We believe unions are essential
As Democrats, we believe in the importance of unions to protect the interests of working people. Capitalism works when employees can organize and bargain on a level playing field with their bosses. It doesn’t work when the government steps in with laws like Right to Work that cripple the ability of unions to function. That’s why we support getting rid of Virginia’s union-busting right to work law.
We believe in government for the people
Above all, what we’re dedicated to is government that works for people. That means a government where payday lenders, major banks, and Dominion Power aren’t able to funnel endless money into electing people who serve their interests rather than ours. Here in Virginia, there are no limits on individual contributions to political candidates, which has led to eye-popping campaign spending up and down the ballot. We believe in reigning in this wild-West campaign finance system with commonsense legislation.
We believe in being smart on crime
Middle River, our local jail, has a rated capacity of 396 inmates, but its population has been as high as 900 on some days. The United States locks up a larger percentage of its population than any other country. At the local level and at the national level, we lock up so many people we can’t find enough cages to put them in. This leads to overcrowded jails and prisons with too few resources to rehabilitate, serving as little more than colleges of crime where offenders become less law-abiding, not more. The solution is not to build more cages. Rather, the solution is to get smart about how we deal with crime – locking people up for serious crimes but reducing our overreliance on jail and prison for petty crimes and pretrial services, and giving mentally ill people the services they need instead of locking them up.
We believe in taking care of people
We believe in an all-of-the-above approach to mental health: expanding the number of psychiatric hospital beds, encouraging more people to become therapists and psychiatrists, and making sure kids in school have the mental health supports they need. What we don’t believe in is playing blame games that demonize our brothers, sisters, daughters, sons who suffer from mental illness just to score cheap political points. People with mental illness are people, and most of them are no more likely to be violent than anyone else. Talking points that imply the opposite – peddled disproportionately but not exclusively by Republicans – are reprehensible and wrong.
We believe in public safety and common sense
Our nation’s outrageous number of gun deaths has many causes, from a broken mental health system that produces far too many suicides to a dysfunctional criminal justice system that fails to prevent violent crime. As Democrats, we’re dedicated to solving these problems – unlike the national Republican party, which complains endlessly about them without ever proposing real solutions. However, we also recognize that another piece of the gun violence pie is the guns themselves. That’s why we support commonsense solutions, like universal background checks nationwide, that can help keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them without being overly burdensome to responsible gun owners.
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Whatever the exact scope of the coming laws, one result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens. Yesterday, the Constitution guaranteed that a woman [could] make her own decision about whether to bear a child, with all the life-transforming consequences that act involves… But no longer.
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- Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, & Kagan, dissenting in Dobbs v. Jackson
We believe in the right to choose
As Democrats, we are proud to be pro-choice: we don’t believe that anyone should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term against their will, and we believe the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, throwing out decades of precedent, was a grave mistake. However, we also believe that abortion availability is only a small piece of the puzzle: more important is making sure that sex education is comprehensive and contraceptives are available so that fewer unplanned pregnancies happen to begin with. We also believe in a strong adoption system, so that women who want to put their child up for adoption can do so with confidence, and a social safety net that supports parents and children after they’re born.
We believe in supporting the troops
Supporting our troops means supporting giving them the healthcare they need, and making the VA work. It means giving our service members the kind of pay and benefits that encourage another generation of Americans to join the military. It means holding defense contractors responsible when they fleece the defense department and hang the troops out to dry; it means fixing a Pentagon budget that has some enlisted personnel on food stamps but pays billions to Boeing and Northrop Grumman. The one thing supporting our troops does not mean is supporting needless foreign wars that put them in harm’s way for no good reason.
We believe in the pursuit of happiness
The pursuit of happiness is one of the fundamental rights that the United States was created to guarantee. That’s why, as Democrats, we support the rights of LGBTQ+ people to live as they want, free from harassment and discrimination. We also believe in a school curriculum that represents the world as it is, not as partisan ideologues wish it were. We are against perpetually offended pundits like Tucker Carlson who try to demonize trans people and LGBTQ+ folks more broadly to score cheap political points and distract from the real problems facing our country and our community.