A Republican state senator in the Virginia General Assembly condemned state Democrats, for denying Virginia deputies a pay increase of 3 percent after some state sheriffs publicly refused to enforce Gov. Ralph Northam’s anti-gun agenda, The Epoch Times reports.
Sen. William “Bill” M. Stanley wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday night that after an amendment of his to give sheriff’s departments a three-percent raise for the upcoming year and was voted down, he was approached by Sen. Richard “Dick” L. Saslaw, a Democrat.
“Saslaw came up and said this to me, ‘Hey Stanley, you want to know why your sheriffs didn’t get a raise? Because they came to our committees and said that they weren’t going to enforce our laws.’ When I asked him which law was he talking about, he said, ‘Gun control.'”
In Virginia, 91 of the state’s 95 counties have passed some sort of measure affirming their support for Second Amendment sanctuaries.
“I was shocked that the Democrats are now punishing our local Sheriff’s Departments (by eliminating a pay raise for them), for their choice to protect and defend our citizens’ Second Amendment rights,” Stanley wrote in a now-viral Facebook post following the incident.
Saslaw told CBS, “All I said was a lot of people are upset that these people come in and say they’re not going to enforce my laws,” he told the network. “That’s all.”
David Campbell, vice chairman of the Effingham County Board in Illinois, told The Epoch Times he sees the incident as a “direct attack on Virginia’s sheriffs.”
“All representatives and senators take the same oath of office as the sheriffs do,” he said via email. “The sheriffs are only doing their job and what they were sworn to do, and that is to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America.”