U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine knows welding.
He grew up working in his father’s ironworking shop in Kansas City and ran a technical school founded by Jesuit missionaries in Honduras in the early 1980s. So, stepping into a welding classroom in Spotsylvania County on Thursday afternoon brought back memories.
“The only thing that’s different is my dad’s shop was not this clean,” joked the Democrat, Virginia’s junior senator.
Kaine was in Spotsylvania to visit the county school system’s Career & Technical Center. He toured the facility, answered questions from students and spoke to the need for career and technical education.
The lawmaker told a group of students that such coursework is important because there’s a need for trained workers in lots of technical areas, and because it helps show how specific academic classes are significant.
Take health care, for example.
“You know, if you’re in a health care pathway, you’re going to like your biology class more because it’s going to be meaningful, not just memorization of facts,” Kaine said.
The former Virginia governor is a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and serves as co-chair of the Senate Career and Technical Education Caucus.
In February, he and three colleagues introduced the Jumpstarting Our Businesses by Supporting Students Act, bipartisan legislation that allows students to use federal Pell Grants to pay for shorter-term, job-training programs. Provisions from the bill were signed into law last year.
But back to welding.
U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, left, talks to Spotsylvania Career & Technical Center student Mason Munoz, a junior at Chancellor High School.
Kaine said he was in Hampton Roads on Wednesday and learned how needed metalworkers are in that region.
President Donald Trump has signaled that there could be an increase in U.S. shipbuilding, already a staple of the Hampton Roads economy. And that area now also will be the country’s center of offshore wind energy, the senator said, an industry that demands some of the same skills.
Kaine said he was told 5,000 students were trained in metalworking in Hampton Roads last year, and that isn’t enough.
“And, so, I mean, I just think that if you’re in any of these kinds of metal trades, that there’s just going to be so much work in Virginia,” he said.
Some of those jobs could be filled by students now in Spotsylvania schools. Of the more than 24,000 children enrolled in the county, 17,000 are in some kind of CTE program, Kaine said he was told.
That could be tops in the state for a locality’s percentage of students with some kind of connection to CTE, he said
Those students are led by teachers with real-world experience, too.
Take metal-trades instructor Josephus Sotomayor. He logged more than two decades in the industry but wasn’t sure he could teach.
His wife spurred him on, however, applying for an open job in his name.
“I said, ‘Honey, I don’t qualify,’” he said Thursday. “She said, ‘Just go.’”
Now, he can say that he’s not only a teacher, but also that he has swapped welding stories with a U.S. senator.
Foreign affairs
At the end of his visit to Spotsylvania, Kaine also spoke about recent actions the U.S. has taken regarding Venezuela and Greenland.
Kaine was part of a group of senators who filed a War Powers Resolution to block the use of American armed forces against Venezuela after Trump ordered the removal of that nation’s president, Nicolás Maduro.
But that measure failed in the GOP-controlled Senate.
So Kaine said the next steps he takes will depend on what happens next.
He said he met with Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado last week, and she wanted to know when a new regime will take power in Venezuela.
That’s a question that is still to be answered, Kaine said, along with matters such as how long the U.S. will remain in the nation and what the Trump administration’s big-picture mission is there. Some light could be shed on those issues Jan. 28, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio is scheduled to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“That’s all going to be now able to be discussed in public in a way that it hasn’t been,” Kaine said.
Kaine said he’s also not on board with Trump’s desire to take over Greenland.
But what could the senator do about it? Maybe three things.
First, if the president moved forward with military action, Kaine could file a War Powers Resolution about that move and force a vote on it in the Senate.
He also could force a vote on tariffs if Trump were to impose them on countries that didn’t agree with his Greenland goals.
And Kaine said he could make use of a bill he got passed a couple of years ago that says the president can’t withdraw from, suspend U.S. participation in, or denigrate or denounce NATO. That would be applicable because Denmark, which oversees Greenland, is in NATO.
The senator said Trump is right about Greenland’s importance.
“He’s right that maybe we should have more assets there, but we have bases in Greenland already that they’re willing to expand,” Kaine said. “And so maybe that’s the path forward. So we’ll get into that, not in the Foreign Relations Committee, but we’ll get into that on the Armed Services Committee.”
