Va.'s senators on the front lines, in the headlines

By: Jeff Schapiro

In Richmond Times Dispatch

This past Friday, during breaks in the U.S. Senate’s vote-o-rama — the marathon of roll-calls on taxes and spending — Virginia Democrats Mark Warner and Tim Kaine shuttled between each other’s hideaways in the basement of the Capitol to plot and scheme.

They’ve been doing a lot of that lately.

It is keeping Kaine and Warner on the front lines — and in the headlines — in the chaotic, up-is-down world that is Donald Trump’s Washington, D.C. This is a rarity for Virginia, a state often content to send to the Senate hidebound conservatives who didn’t necessarily work well together and for whom sitting on the sidelines qualified as activism.

Issues, policies, personalities, seniority, a penchant for the practical — and their respective concerns, nurtured and refined over more than 30 years in elective politics, and a personal friendship that reaches back four decades to Harvard Law School — are combining to simultaneously elevate Warner and Kaine as sustained voices in debates over national security and global trade.

Warner, seeking a fourth term in 2026, has — and not just as the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee in a Republican-controlled Senate — become a watchdog on the Trump administration, warning that Signal-gate, the continuing purge of seasoned military leaders deemed personally disloyal to the president, the mass firing of CIA staff, and protectionist tariffs inflaming allies and adversaries are weakening America’s defense, diplomatic and economic standing.

Kaine, elected to a third, perhaps final, term in 2024, has — as a member of the Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees, where there are still flickers of bipartisanship — harnessed the discontent of Democrats and Republicans with Trump’s tariffs, winning Senate passage of a measure shielding Canada from the 25% import tax on its products imposed by the president. Though doomed in the House, the proposal was an early rebuke to the centerpiece of Trump’s trade policy.

“They’re being Mark and Tim,” said Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, a veteran Democratic operative who, from his perch in mountainous, deep-red Craig County, has counseled his party for more than 20 years on ways to win back rural — read: Republican — voters. “I don’t think either one of their policies have changed. Plus, people like them.”

That Kaine and Warner — the former succeeded the latter as governor, during eight years of Democratic control, from 2002 to 2010 — are at center stage nationally is, in part, because they represent the state differently. Their interests are complementary. Ditto their personalities.

This makes for a productive partnership, ensuring Virginia has pull across Senate committees with jurisdiction over services and spending prized in the state: defense, the social safety net, scientific research and economic development. Also, that the Virginians doing the pulling — a somewhat tightly wound Warner and a comparatively mellow Kaine — have the standing and sources to get things done.

In addition to Intelligence, Warner sits on Finance; Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs; and Rules. Kaine’s assignments beyond Armed Services and Foreign Relations include Education, Health, Labor and Pensions. Both — Warner, first elected in 2008, is senior to Kaine, a senator since 2012 and unsuccessful vice presidential nominee in 2016 — are members of the Budget Committee, giving them dibs on spending.

The Warner and Kaine profiles are further magnified by one of Virginia’s defining characteristics: If only because of an accident of geography — that the state is next door to D.C. — Virginia is a giant beneficiary of federal largess now imperiled by Trump’s attack on government spending and employment.

According to the U.S. Census, more than 320,000 full-time federal civilian employees live in Virginia, working for agencies located in the state or its neighbors. It is estimated by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments that there are about 190,000 federal jobs based in Virginia — one of the top-three concentrations in the country. And Virginia leads the nation in federal contracts, totaling $106 billion.

Such numbers would seem staggering to an earlier pair of Democratic senators from Virginia — Harry F. Byrd Sr. and A. Willis Robertson. They served in the Senate together for 20 years, starting in the late 1940s, though their alliance was initially forged in the early 1900s as members of the Virginia Senate.

Byrd would become the state’s maximum leader, advancing — as a governor and U.S. senator who led the tax-writing and tax-cutting Finance Committee — a mantra of fiscal conservatism. He would decry as wasteful the billions of dollars spent on programs that, he believed, were of little value to a then-heavily rural constituency, with which he shared a rigid commitment to racial segregation.

As the state grew — becoming a suburban-dominated dynamo in no small measure because of federal spending that has contributed to high education levels and higher incomes — a center-right Republican with a broad independent streak, John Warner, would become Virginia’s dominant figure in the Senate. First elected in 1978, Warner won five terms, becoming the state’s longest-serving Republican senator. On his retirement in 2008 — Warner died in 2021 — he was succeeded by Mark Warner. The two were not related.

Warner was chairman of the Armed Services Committee, watching out for its many military installations and its defense industry. And while he was hawkish on national security and intelligence, Warner went dove-ish, in the view of Republican absolutists, opposing Robert Bork for the U.S. Supreme Court and the Senate candidacy of Iran-Contra figure Ollie North, and endorsing Hillary Clinton over Trump in 2016. Warner backed Mark Warner for reelection in 2014.

Over 30 years in the Senate, Warner served with two Republicans, Paul S. Trible Jr. and George Allen; two Democrats, Chuck Robb and Jim Webb; and a Democrat-turned-independent, Harry F. Byrd Jr., who — much as his father did — made a career of criticizing federal fiscal indiscipline.

Brent Tarter, a historian who has written extensively on Virginia’s politics and government, notes that many of its U.S. senators, a la Byrd the elder, were largely preoccupied with state matters.

There were exceptions: Carter Glass, who in the early 1900s won restrictions on voting by Blacks and poor whites, was the co-author of banking safeguards adopted during the Great Depression. Thomas Staples Martin, Byrd’s predecessor as leader of the state’s conservative political apparatus, was Senate Democratic majority leader in 1917; then, minority leader after Republicans won control.

Tarter suggests that Warner and Kaine — much like John Warner — have struck a balance as senators. And that, to some degree, recalls an earlier era.

“Although they remained partisan leaders in the state and within their parties, all three worked with members of the other party in the Senate to achieve shared goals that they perceived to be in the national interest,” said Tarter. “A rather old-fashioned idea that what is good for the country should be good for the political party, too.”