West Virginia’s minimum wage has been stuck at $8.75 for a decade. The minimum wage worker today has taken a 35% pay cut compared to the same worker in 2016 because of inflation. Raising the minimum wage will bring many workers and their families out of poverty, reduce deaths of despair, improve the health of newborns and enhance the attractiveness of working. It would be a powerful economic and social policy costing the taxpayer nothing.
Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and Marines in Los Angeles is unauthorized by the circumstances, and unlawful under the Constitution and federal laws. Using government troops against civilians has been hated in this country since the Boston Massacre in 1770. Trump is wildly out of his lane and, once again, it will require the courts — or the people — to stop him.
Jefferson County’s Republican delegation to the Legislature has just told local people it doesn’t matter what we think. Every one of Jefferson’s Delegates and Senators voted to approve HB 2014 authorizing data centers consuming massive amounts of electric power and water to be located pretty much anywhere in the state. And all this can happen without any local zoning or environmental control of the construction or operation of the data centers. This breathtaking anti-democratic law, dubbed the Power Generation and Consumption Act, is the first of its kind in the nation.
The behavior of Rep. Riley Moore has been embarrassing – both to his constituents and to himself. Since being elected to represent West Virginia’s Second Congressional District in November 2024, Moore has not had an original thought. Instead, he has let Donald Trump do his thinking, eagerly supporting every misguided and dangerous policy spun out from the Trump chaos. But the most shameful thing Moore has done is to fly to El Salvador and pose for gloating photos in front of a cell full of deportees hustled illegally out of the United States.
Why should we care about due process? Just wait until your child or grandchild is rounded up in a drug bust simply because she hung out with the wrong people and had a tattoo on her arm. Then you’ll understand.
Veteran watchers of the West Virginia Legislature will have noticed the trend to hide controversial bills behind innocent titles. This is the case with SB 599 introduced by Senator Patricia Rucker from Jefferson County on February 26. The title of the bill is Sound Science in Regulations Act, but the bill would impose an anti-science regime that would hobble the regulatory ability of state administrative agencies.
Over and over in American history we have tried tariffs to solve economic problems. Over and over tariffs have failed to solve those problems, while creating new ones. Sometimes it takes the passage of years for us to forget how badly tariffs hurt us the last time we tried them. Other times we have a leader who just doesn’t know or care about history and recklessly promotes tariffs to fix an imaginary problem. We have that leader now.
Lately have been spending too much time watching football on television. Lurking behind my gridiron fun is a worry about what might happen to civil liberty during the upcoming Trump administration. By civil liberty I mean the kinds of activity that are authorized or outright protected by our Constitution. Between beers – or maybe because of them – I realize that football provides some metaphors for talking about civil liberty in our political moment.
HE’S BACK! And this time Donald Trump will have a compliant Congress and a whole roster of willing Cabinet ministers. The first thing he promises to do — after upending international trade with tariffs — is to deport millions of immigrants. If this did not promise to be both tragic and harmful to the economy, I would feel like making a big bowl of popcorn, pulling up a chair and watching the whole thing crash.
Nothing shows how desperately West Virginia needs a change than Jim Justice’s veto of HB 5528. Coal fuels 92% of West Virginia’s electric generation, while renewable solar energy is responsible for less than 2%. HB 5528 would have made a modest increase in the amount of solar allowed under West Virginia law. But, according to Justice, the veto was necessary to protect coal. Seriously?