After seven weeks of session, Congress was in recess, and I was back in the district this week. I hosted my first telephone town hall, opened my new office in Brunswick, and held another roundtable with local government leaders. The Supreme Court also wrapped up its session and handed down several major rulings and the Biden Administration announced significant infrastructure investments headed to Virginia.

The Supreme Court ended its 2022-2023 Session on Friday after issuing several landmark decisions on election law, affirmative action, free speech and LGBTQ anti-discrimination laws, and the President’s student loan relief program. 

The week started on a high note with Moore v. Harper, in which the Court considered the power of state courts to review election regulations established by state legislatures. In a 6-3 opinion, Chief Justice Roberts rejected the fringe “independent state legislature” theory, which claimed state legislatures have the exclusive authority to regulate federal elections, independent from state judicial review. Read my statement on the decision here. 

This week took a turn when the Court struck down the use of affirmative action in admission programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina as unconstitutional. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, Chief Justice Roberts ruled that such programs violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. As Justice Sotomayor noted in her dissent, the decision “rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.” 

Justice Jackson went even farther in eviscerating the majority opinion:

With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces “colorblindness for all” by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. And having so detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences, the Court has now been lured into interfering with the crucial work that UNC and other institutions of higher learning are doing to solve America’s real-world problems.

No one benefits from ignorance. Although formal racelinked legal barriers are gone, race still matters to the lived experiences of all Americans in innumerable ways, and today’s ruling makes things worse, not better. The best that can be said of the majority’s perspective is that it proceeds (ostrich-like) from the hope that preventing consideration of race will end racism. But if that is its motivation, the majority proceeds in vain. If the colleges of this country are required to ignore a thing that matters, it will not just go away. It will take longer for racism to leave us. And, ultimately, ignoring race just makes it matter more.

Read my statement on the decision here.

In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, the Court considered whether Colorado's public-accommodation law violates the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause if it compels a website artist and designer to design a website for a same-sex wedding that she claimed was against her religious beliefs. In a 6-3 decision, Justice Gorsuch held that it did. As Justice Sotomayor stated in her dissent, “the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.” She noted that the ruling was part of "a backlash to the movement for liberty and equality for gender and sexual minorities" and a type of "reactionary exclusion," characterizing it as heartbreaking and analogizing it to restaurants that only allowed Black people to pick up their meals outside but not be served within the restaurant, effectively making them second-class citizens. You can read the statement of the Equality Caucus, of which I am a member, here. 

In Biden v. Nebraska, the Court struck down President Biden’s student-debt relief program. In a 6-3 decision, Chief Justice Roberts ruled the Secretary of Education lacked the authority under the HEROES Act to cancel $430 billion of student loan principal, even though that law was intended to provide relief to student-loan holders during a national emergency such as the COVID pandemic. Read my statement on the decision here. 

In response to the opinion, President Biden and his Administration announced new steps they will take to provide debt relief and support for student loan borrowers, which you can read about here.

It was nice to travel around the district again after seven straight weeks of voting in Washington.

This week I hosted my first tele town hall to provide an update to nearly 900 attendees on my first 100 days in office. I also answered questions and heard concerns from constituents across the district on everything from veterans benefits, the debt ceiling agreement, public education, and more.  If you missed the town hall, you can find the replay here. Stay tuned for additional town halls soon.

This week I continued my leadership roundtable series with local government officials from Sussex, Surry, and Southampton. These meetings are an excellent opportunity for me to provide updates to local government leaders and hear more about their priorities so that I may better represent the district. Infrastructure (particularly water) and economic development opportunities were high priorities for each of these localities in the southern part of the district. I have now hosted five rountables with all fifteen of the localities in the district. I look forward to continuing these conversations on a regular basis.

These roundtables also give me the chance to visit some of the landmarks and small businesses in the district, like the legendary Virginia Diner in Wakefield, where I stopped for lunch and peanuts! My family used to stop here on our way from Petersburg to Virginia Beach when I was a kid, so it was a pleasure to be back.

I was excited to open my satellite office in Brunswick County with a ribbon cutting ceremony. This office - as well as our Mobile McClellans - will ensure my staff remains accessible to constituents in all parts of the district. The new office is in the Brunswick County Conference Center, 100 Athletic Field Road, and will be open every Thursday from 10 am to 4:30 pm or by appointment. For more information, call (804) 690-5809.

The Biden Administration announced this week billions in infrastructure investments for Virginia as a result of the Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act: 

• The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality will receive $3 million to develop, in collaboration with localities, a comprehensive climate mitigation plan and to update any plans already in place;

• The Federal Transportation Authority awarded $4,690,010 in grants to localities within congressional districts 1,2,4,5 and 9 totaling for low or no emission buses;

• Virginia will receive $1.4 billion from the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program to expand broadband to unserved and underserved areas. This is the sixth largest grant nationally!

You can learn more about these and other historic infrastructure investments in our communities as a result of President Biden’s extraordinary legislative accomplishments at invest.gov.

Sincerely,

Rep. Jennifer McClellan

Member of Congress

Contact Me

Washington DC Office
2417 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Phone: (202) 225-6365

Richmond District Office
110 North Robinson Street

Suite 403
Richmond, VA 23220

Phone: (804) 486-1840