GLEN ALLEN, Virginia — Sixteen months after going from underdog Republican candidate for governor in a solidly blue state to the avatar of substantive conservative governing, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s lanky frame glides with ease through J.J.’s Grille in suburban Richmond as he chats with locals there for a late lunch. The first Generation X governor of the Dominion State talked to the Washington Examiner about the results of the first conservative Virginia government in a dozen years and what lies ahead for Youngkin and the GOP nationally.
Washington Examiner: You signed an executive order expanding treatment for those addicted to fentanyl and directing harsher punishments for those who manufacture or deal it, among other details. What brought you to this order?
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Gov. Glenn Youngkin: We have a crisis. We truly have a crisis. It's an epidemic, and sadly, it's one that has recently been let loose. The fentanyl overdoses today are 20 times what they were just 10 years ago. This is just a matter of getting, first, the word out. Second of all, making sure people understand what to do, so we're training people all over Virginia today.
Third of all is holding people accountable on the dealer side of it, so we passed a bill that classified fentanyl as a weapon of terrorism, and that allows us to unleash a harsher set of penalties. I'm frustrated we didn't get a very straightforward bill that would be able to charge a dealer who knowingly deals fentanyl [to] someone [who] dies with a felony homicide.
But then, finally, we are literally going to work in our Right Help, Right Now program, which is our overhaul of our own health system, in order to coordinate, not just in our health departments but across all of our agencies, a coordinated response to this epidemic. It's just critical. The first lady and I have very close friends who lost a son, and he was poisoned, and the dealer was not held accountable. We just got to get on this.
It is horrific. It's not just Virginia. It's all over the country. I am particularly frustrated that our president doesn't seem to care, honestly.
We know the whole process here, and our president doesn't do anything about it. Let's just be clear. Title 42 has been a mask, hiding a complete failure of the administration to secure the border and to stop this horrific flow of people that has ended up with human tragedy and with illegal drugs and empowered really the drug cartels to dictate everything that's going on. And it all starts in China.
We know it. There's no question about this — 75% of the overdoses in Virginia today are fentanyl that comes directly from China through Mexico, and the president's not doing anything about that. I just cannot believe that this is what we get out of Joe Biden. Americans deserve better. Virginians deserve better.
Washington Examiner: If you look at the problem of fentanyl, but also the problem in our cities with homelessness and with gun violence, why don’t we address mental illness in a meaningful way?
Youngkin: When we were fortunate enough to get hired and I was interviewing our secretary of health and human resources, John Littel, we talked about, in his interview, overhauling our behavioral health system completely. We went to work right out of the box, and it took about eight months for us to design a new system. We rolled it out last fall, the Right Help, Right Now program. It is a complete overhaul because we need it.
Our behavioral health system in Virginia and in the country was not constructed to deal with what we're dealing with, which is beyond the imagination about how bad it is, where 50% of high school girls have at least contemplated suicide. We have just record numbers of kids who are depressed, and we have self-harm and then harming others. Our system was, unfortunately, so focused on hospitals that we now are overwhelming our hospitals, and as a result, we're not able to render any support to people when they need it, the day they need it. Instead, they get an appointment in a month or they get an appointment in six weeks. It's just awful.
This is why Right Help, Right Now is so important. It's, first, recognizing this has to be a complete transformation. It's going to take us three years. We're getting a huge chunk done in one year, but anybody who thinks that there's a magic wand here is completely missing it. We've got a comprehensive system to overhaul, first, pre-crisis. We can put resources into schools and so elderly can find help. This is critical pre-crisis so that folks can get help when they need it.
Then during crisis, we now have budget proposals in to have mobile crisis units across the entire Commonwealth of Virginia, crisis receiving centers that are outside the hospital so that folks can go to a specific facility that is designed for a behavioral health crisis. Then also investing in our acute psychiatric hospitals so that we can deal with these toughest cases, but we can triage and have people go where they need and have us go where they are. It's hugely important.
Then, finally, post-crisis to give people a path back to their communities, but they need someplace to go first where they can get support. So we put in a comprehensive overhaul plan. It's on top of the extraordinary amount that we already spend. There's about $600 million more between last year's budget and our proposals this year to invest in our behavioral health system. This will be a huge step. It'll get us about halfway home, and then we'll finish up the next two years beyond that. We can't wait.
This is not a Republican versus Democrat issue, and yet my Senate Democrat friends are in the way because they won't send me a budget. They won't send me a budget. I'm so frustrated with them because all they have to do is sit down and look at the facts. We've got $3.6 billion surplus. We're actually running hundreds of millions of dollars ahead of plan, ahead of the projected $3.6 billion surplus. We have plenty of money to cut taxes and invest in these most important things, and yet they're playing politics. I just think Virginians are so tired of people playing politics over their personal needs. The Senate Democrats are just out of bounds, and Virginians know it.
Washington Examiner: Then is the solution to get the upper chamber to have a Republican majority? Both former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump lost state houses and state senate seats in their midterms. How do you intend to rebuild in Virginia?
Youngkin: Well, I'll just remind you that when I launched our campaign at the beginning of 2021, Republicans had not won a statewide election for 12 years. The bottom line was we'd forgotten one basic truth, which is we have a lot in common. In fact, we have to fill the tent up, not restrict people from coming in it.
This was all about party building. Of course, what we found is that the issues are not just Republican issues — they're Virginian issues. Safe communities, so let's back law enforcement. Good schools, let's stand for excellence and put equity off to the side and stand for excellence. Let's support parents, and let's recognize that God put parents in charge of their children, not politicians and bureaucrats, and let's stand up for them. Let's recognize that Virginia's overtaxing Virginians, and let's go cut taxes and lower the cost of living. Finally, let's run government better.
Lo and behold, when common sense was given space, people want common sense. We won the Hispanic vote and the Asian vote. We got a larger percentage of the black vote in a long, long, long, long time. Women came back to the Republican Party, and we won Greater Richmond and Hampton Roads, which we had lost for a long period of time.
It's that same approach in 2023 that we now don't have to talk about what we will do. We can talk about what we're doing and the fact that it is working. In our first 16 months now in office, we got moving. Promises made should be promises kept. We were able to cut taxes by $4 billion, and we were able to deliver the largest increase in pay for law enforcement and in training and equipment. We were able to empower parents to make a decision for their child.
We've seen huge companies move here. Boeing and Raytheon and Lego have moved here, and we've seen companies that are here expanding. Finally, when we bring common sense to schools and law enforcement and a behavioral health plan and how to run government, it works. I think Virginians like what's going on. We can see momentum.
Washington Examiner: Do you think that Virginia could, if you get to the majority in the state Senate and you hold it in the House of Delegates, do you think that this state could go red in '24?
Youngkin: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. What we've seen in Virginia, and I think this is why the nation is so interested in what's going on in Virginia, was we took a state that was truly blue. I mean, let's just be blunt, it was totally blue. In 2021, we demonstrated that Virginians were receptive to common sense, conservative principles, and a governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general who were going to deliver on this, and they gave us our House. Now in 2023, I think we can do it again. What we see here is a moment for us to demonstrate to the nation that a state that really is very much a microcosm of our nation can choose Republicans to lead, Republicans can deliver, and we can get things moving. Results matter.
Washington Examiner: Are you running for president?
Youngkin: As everybody's asked me this, I continue to be incredibly humbled. Listen, this kid 40 years ago was washing dishes and taking out trash because I needed a job.
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Washington Examiner: You're Gen X?
Youngkin: I'm a latchkey kid. My mom was a nurse. For people to even ask me this question about running for president, I'm kind of overwhelmed with it. I pinch myself every day as I walk out of that governor's mansion. My focus is to win these [state Senate] elections. This is a statement for Virginia, and I think it's a statement for the nation — that we can do this. We can press forward with common sense, conservative policies. We can lead. We can deliver. It works. If we can do it in Virginia, we can do it anywhere.