The Virginia Supreme Court declared final redistricting boundaries this past week. Although the final boundaries are somewhat close to the draft created by the Court-appointed “special masters” earlier in the month, the Court apparently paid attention to the many comments that were posted to the Court’s redistricting site.

Craig County stayed in the Ninth instead of moving into the Sixth. The Sixth did get Alleghany, Frederick, and Clark Counties along with the cities of Winchester, Covington, and Salem. The way Roanoke County is divided between the Sixth and the Ninth Districts changed a bit as well.

The Sixth District lost the northern part of Bedford County to the Ninth except for the Forest area, which along with Lynchburg City and Amherst County went to the Fifth. The southern part of Bedford County moved from the Fifth to the Ninth. You can look at the final boundaries of Congressional districts by clicking here, of House of Delegates districts by clicking here, and State Senate districts by clicking here.

Redistricting means that the State Central Committee (SCC) of the Republican Party of Virginia faces a major change in its membership. By rule, a member of SCC must live in the district from which he or she was elected. Because of redistricting, a lot of people who served on SCC until this week are no longer members. I know of two district chairs who are no longer district chairs because their homes are no longer in the districts that they chaired. Quite a few regular members in the eastern part of the state are no longer on SCC because the district changes were rather substantial in that end of the state.

One (now former) SCC member from the Ninth lives in one of the precincts that moved into the Sixth. Even though the Sixth also lost a SCC member, the former Ninth SCC member does not automatically fill the vacant slot in the Sixth. One former SCC member from the Fifth lives in Green County, which is now in the Seventh District. Another former member lives in Goochland County which was in the Seventh but is now in the Fifth. They cannot trade jobs. Each district committee has the responsibility of filling any vacancies on SCC from their own districts.

The seat I held representing the Sixth on SCC is now vacant because Lynchburg moved to the Fifth. I have worked closely with many people in the Fifth over the years, and I may see about running for the open Fifth District SCC seat. Either way, things should be interesting in Republican politics for the next little while.

As I leave the Sixth let me say that I have greatly enjoyed the time I have spent serving Sixth District Republicans on SCC. It has been my honor to serve you and my delight to meet you. You continue to give me hope that we can turn this mess we call our government around. There are still good people in America, and a healthy percentage of them live in the Sixth Congressional District of Virginia.

I was asked to run in 2016, and once I decided to run, I also decided to do the best job that I could. I have kept the campaign promises I made in that campaign. Until COVID I traveled to meetings and events all over the district talking with you and getting to know you so that I could better represent you on SCC. Secondly, I have done what I can to educate you about Virginia political issues. Even before I was first elected, I began writing a weekly newsletter for that purpose. The first one posted on March 16, 2016.

Think about the responsibility of preparing a cogent, intelligent, educational, helpful article of approximately 800 words every week for six years. Some weeks I’ve had several topics from which to choose. Other weeks, I had no idea what my topic would be until just hours before my article was due. At times that weekly deadline just weighed on me. I don’t think people understood how important their encouragement was to me when they mentioned that they liked an article or even that they read my articles every week. That encouragement kept me going.

I have never made a cent for any of my articles no matter whether they came out in a newsletter or in a rewritten form for the Waynesboro News Virginian or in The Bull Elephant. I kept writing because I made the commitment to the Republicans of the Sixth District that I would do so for the sake of keeping you informed. Now that my term is (prematurely) ended, I can say that I have fulfilled that commitment I made six years ago. I’m going to take a little time off from writing newsletters. Maybe I will pick it up again if I see the need. But in any event, thank you for your support and encouragement. It has been a wild and wonderful trip.

Cordially,
Steve “Doc” Troxel, Ph.D.

I was in a hardware store in small town America, somewhere out in “Fly-Over Country” as the east and west coast thumb-suckers call the middle of our country. If the liberal dweebs truly knew the people they were belittling as unimportant, they would know that they ignore them to their peril. But I digress.

The lady salesclerk – yes, ladies, including the female owner of the store, can be quite knowledgeable about hardware. The lady helping me had a fussy toddler in one arm while she helped me find the right sheet metal screws with the other. (Family is important in fly-over country.) As the child continued to fuss, one customer said, “Looks like someone doesn’t want anything for Christmas. Santa is still making his list.” The little girl – who will probably know hardware as well as her mama by the time she graduates middle school – got very still and stopped fussing.

This is an example of how Christmas has gone full circle.

Jesus was not born on December 25. Church historians believe Jesus was born in the spring of the year. However, the people of the dark ages of Europe held pagan festivals in honor of the winter solstice. They, as do we, need the occasional holiday, so instead of forbidding the people from celebrating the festival, Church leaders founded a religious celebration in its place. They called it Christ Mass.

This in no way denies the reality of the miraculous birth, sinless life, and atoning death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This merely points out how we came to celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25.

You wonder what this has to do with a hardware store. Follow me here. As the Christ Mass (or Christmas) became increasingly popular with the people. Various elements were added to it. In the Netherlands, Bishop Nicholas started the tradition of going around the night before the celebration and giving treats and small presents to “good little girls and boys.” Often he was called Bishop Claus, which is a short form of Nicholas. Thus, when the Catholic Church canonized him and declared him a saint, he became Saint Nicholas, or in the Dutch, Santa Claus.

Centuries later Santa Claus was given his jolly, fat, chimney-crawling-in-a-red-suit, reindeer driving persona in a poem authored by Clement Clarke Moore in 1823 entitled “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” or more commonly “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.”

This is where things started to come full circle. Instead of being a festival to honor the birth of Jesus Christ, Christmas began slowly reverting to – at least in the minds of many – nothing more than a gift giving festival at the winter solstice that causes great anxiety, stress, greed, disappointment, and lack of gratitude among those who have forgotten “the reason for the season.”

The only giving we really need to be concerned about is the gift of God’s Son to bring joy and salvation to the world. Instead, kids are concerned about getting what they want, parents go deeply into debt each year so that their kids won’t curse at them for not getting them what they demanded, and stores fear bankruptcy if they don’t make at least a minimum amount in sales at Christmas time.

I suppose this is inevitable since one poll recently indicated that for the first time in American history less than half of Americans attend church regularly. Another poll indicated that less than half of millennials believe in God at all.

Those people need our pity. They seek out joy and fulfillment in things that will never provide it on a scale that can be met only by a relationship with God. Instead, they seek meaning in drugs, food, sex, money, power, all the things that might make someone feel good for a moment, but cannot provide lasting peace, joy and fulfillment.Back to the hardware store: as I watched the little girl become very good at the threat of Santa not bringing her presents, it hit me that Christmas has reverted to a pagan festival for far too many people. There is more to Christmas than the all-consuming gift-getting practiced in too many homes. Unless these families one day discover the true wonder of Christmas, all they will have left from the gift getting season is a huge pile of discarded packaging.

Cordially,
Steve “Doc” Troxel, Ph.D.

The Republican Committee of Virginia’s Sixth Congressional District (CD6) held their quarterly meeting in Waynesboro on Thursday night, September 16, 2021. It was a quiet and positive meeting.

For the sake of those who may be new to Republican Party organization, a District Committee consists of the chairmen of each local Republican committee in the district along with officers elected at the biennial district convention. Those officers include the District Chairman, three individuals to represent the District on the Republican Party’s State Central Committee (sort of like the board of directors of the state party), and regional vice chairmen (in the Sixth District anyway). Committees also include representatives from Young Republicans, College Republicans, and the Virginia Federation of Republican Women, all three of which are auxiliary organizations to the Republican Party. The membership is rounded out by a vice chairman, secretary, treasurer, and if the district’s vote for Republicans meets certain criteria, one or two more representatives to the State Central Committee. These last five officers are all elected by the other members of the District Committee.

Because this past meeting was deep in the holiday season, several members were unable to attend, although eight members sent proxies.

Juliana McGrath, the College Republicans’ representative to CD6, reported on the change in the thinking of college-age voters. In the gubernatorial election four years ago, exit polls showed that 68 percent of college age voters had voted for the Democrat candidate. In the gubernatorial election last month, exit polls showed that only 52 percent of college-age voters had voted for the Democrat. In just four years, the split went from 36 points to only 4 points – a huge turnaround.

The committee then took a brief look at a call for convention that CD6 is required to hold in the late spring of 2022 for the purpose of electing a District Chair and three regional vice-chairs as well as nominating our candidate for Congress.

The difficulty the committee faces is that the call cannot be completed until after redistricting is completed. Until that happens, the committee does not even know who is eligible to attend the convention. As of this writing, CD6 is slated to gain four counties and three cities while losing one and a half counties and one city.

Also, because Republicans use “weighted votes” at conventions, the number of delegate votes allotted to each county and city is still up in the air depending on how much of a county is located in a given district. For example, a larger percentage of Roanoke County may be incorporated into CD 6 than had previously been there. That would change the percentage of Roanoke County’s weighted vote that could be used at a CD 6 convention as opposed to the other district (CD9) to which the rest of the county will likely belong.

CD6 would like to hold the convention somewhere in the middle of the district – Augusta or Shenandoah, depending on the facilities available. At the moment, anyone interested in attending the convention as a delegate or observer should pencil in Saturday May 21 on their calendar as the date currently being considered for the convention.

Following that discussion, a resolution was presented by the Resolutions Committee. After stating a number of reasons supporting the resolution (the “whereas’s”), the resolution called upon the General Assembly to undo the damage that has been done to our Second Amendment rights during the past two years. These include removing “Red Flag” laws and reversing the law that allows local governments to pass their own laws independent of the state. This only leads to confusion for law-abiding gun owners.

Additionally, the resolution acknowledged, praised, and supported the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL) in their efforts to protect our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

Randy Gilbert gave a brief report on election integrity efforts in Virginia, following which the meeting adjourned.

All in all, it was a quiet meeting and a positive one as well.

Cordially,
Steve “Doc” Troxel, Ph.D.

Every ten years, following the U.S. Census that occurs in years ending in zero, political borders are redone within states. This is often done by the legislature in each state. That unfortunately often leads to gerrymandering, a practice that sets boundaries for the sake of political advantage rather than for the sake of the people in the district. In 2010, Virginia’s General Assembly set some strange boundaries with a lot of weirdly shaped districts.

Recently Virginia passed a constitutional amendment that now creates a special commission which represents the two main political parties equally. The commission is supposed to set the new district boundaries. Unfortunately, they could not reach an agreement – for political reasons – so the newly passed constitutional amendment throws the decision to the Virginia Supreme Court. The Court appointed two “special masters” to recommend new district lines and present their work to the Court for amendment or approval.

The special masters’ first draft was released on December 8. The Supreme Court is allowing public comments, and the lawyers for political parties and individual elected officials have not weighed in on the lines. Nor has the Supreme Court announced how it will proceed from here. Those with some knowledge of these matters believe that the Court will make a final determination in January, but it could be earlier.

This article is too brief to discuss the significant changes in all 40 state senate districts and 100 delegate districts, so it is limited to the rather stark changes in congressional districts.

The number of Congressmen is limited by federal law to 435 total members. They are divided out to each state based on the percentage of the country’s total population contained in that state. For example, Alaska and Montana have relatively small populations so they have only one Congressman each. Because of population shifts revealed by the census, California lost some of its Congressional seats and Texas gained seats. Virginia retains the eleven Congressional seats it had prior to the census.

The target population for each Virginia district is 784,672. The draft presented by the special masters leaves every district within a quarter of one percent of that total. Because of differences in population growth in the Commonwealth, Congressional districts in the western part of the state had to become larger in geographical size.

When redoing the Sixth and Ninth Congressional District lines, the special masters agreed that the Blue Ridge Mountains provided a natural dividing line for “communities of interest” so they tried to keep those two districts on the west side of the mountains. The draft for the Sixth District is within 0.16 percent of the target population. To accomplish that the draft takes Craig and Allegheny Counties and the Cities of Covington and Salem away from the Ninth District and puts them in the Sixth along with several additional precincts in Roanoke County, which was already split between the two districts. Additionally, the Sixth also gets Frederick and Clarke Counties and the City of Winchester from the Tenth District at the northern end of the district.

To bring the Ninth up to the target population (within 0.17 percent), their lines moved east picking up the part of Henry County that was not already in the Ninth along with most of Bedford County (except for the Forest area just west of Lynchburg) and all of Franklin County.

The Fifth District has been geographically the largest, most sprawling district in Virginia. That district was made much more contiguous (as the law requires). To do this, the draft would move the Forest area of Bedford County, Amherst County, and the City of Lynchburg from the Sixth District to the Fifth. Additionally, the counties north of Charlottesville that had been in the Fifth would be moved to the Tenth District. To bring the Fifth up to the target population (within 0.14 percent), the draft would add the western half of Chesterfield County (on a north/south line from a point just east of Midlothian) and Amelia and Powhatan Counties to the Fifth.

The other proposed Congressional Districts bear little resemblance to how they look now. They are much more contiguous than they have been although the Second District looks like a trendy capital “J” because it wraps around the east, south, and west sides of a District Three that is comprised of the four cities in Hampton Roads.

To learn more, go to www.virginiaredistricting.org and click on “information page” in the first paragraph.

Cordially,
Steve “Doc” Troxel, Ph.D.

In 1941, Japan dragged the United States into World War II by attacking Pearl Harbor, Hawaii – an action for which the U.S. military was totally unprepared. The following year, the U.S. Navy’s ground troops – the United States Marines – eventually aided by units of the U.S. Army, fought and won a bloody, six-month-long battle against a fierce and tenacious enemy on the island of Guadalcanal. The First Marine Division was on the front page of every newspaper in America due to their ferocious and heroic efforts to protect freedom around the world through a battle on a tiny bit of land in the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific Ocean.

Obviously, one battle did not win the war in the Pacific just as one battle at Pearl Harbor did not lose it. Many more battles were fought and won – Midway, New Guinea, Tarawa, Saipan, Luzon, Iwo Jima, among others – before America could claim victory in the war.

Republicans are currently in a similar situation. Republicans were unprepared for what happened in November 2020. The next year, Republicans won a long and fierce battle in Virginia. The victory made headlines around the country. But as at Guadalcanal, the war is not over, nor is victory assured.

During World War II, America called upon “citizen soldiers,” non-professional military men and women, to fill the ranks of the forces needed to win the War. Because of what they accomplished, they have become known as “the greatest generation,” a truly fitting title for those heroes of freedom.

Republicans also use an army of volunteer citizens. Their opponents, on the other hand, have many paid professionals working year-round to win the next battle and the next and the one after that.

After America-loving Virginia conservatives won the battle of the November 2021 election, euphoria reigned. People celebrated. But many exhausted volunteers thought, “My job is done here.” Unfortunately, it isn’t.

Following Guadalcanal, the exhausted First Marine Division wanted to go home, but they couldn’t. The war continued because of a tenacious and crafty enemy. At the end of 2021, the Republican’s volunteer army needs to stay in the fight because the war continues. Certainly, there is a need for R & R (rest and relaxation) after a big battle, but that is only for a brief time.

After that, armies need to be reinforced, resupplied, retrained, and released into battle again.

Over the holidays, Republican volunteers will take time to enjoy their friends and families as they rejuvenate themselves for the coming battles. Many of them will move into new positions of responsibility as election integrity and get-out-the-vote efforts expand in preparation for the 2022 general election. Many new volunteers will join their ranks.

No one should wait until November to take the next step in the fight. As proscribed by the Code of Virginia, events leading up to November General Elections begin as early as January. Additionally, there are mass meetings, unit meetings, and conventions that require volunteer involvement. City council meetings, board of supervisor meetings, and other public events need volunteers to attend, hear and understand what is being done in each meeting so that elected officials can be held accountable to those who elected them.

In most areas of Virginia, the need for competent, tenacious fighters is great. The training is good. The results are crucial. Conservatives must stand up and fill those roles.

The Republican Party needs to keep its huge, mobilized force of volunteers intact. In fact, it needs to expand that force. Most people don’t know how the election process works, and that leaves the process open to exploitation. Volunteer, learn the process, and be a part of keeping the election process honest, fair, and accurate.

Cordially,

Steve “Doc” Troxel, Ph.D.

 

P.S. To see what a dedicated volunteer can do with a little creativity, watch this video on Progressive Lynchburg City Councilman Beau Wright’s lack of support for public safety. Re-election is coming.

https://www.facebook.com/LynchburgRepublicanCityCommittee/videos/1125945801275751