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Republican Judges Killed The Virginia Gerrymander. It Doesn't Matter.
There's always a way to block a Democratic redistricting plan.
Whether it takes a highly questionable interpretation of a hyper-specific statute or a bad-faith interpretation of how and when states can rearrange electoral maps, Republican-appointed judges on the state and federal levels never lack for a reason to stop Democrats from securing an electoral edge, big or small.
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Republican justices on Virginia's Supreme Court on Friday ruled against the state's Democratic gerrymander in what you know by now is a shamefully partisan ruling by Republican officials doing everything they can to save Big Boy from facing even the slightest bit of accountability. Republican-appointed judges have ruled against various parts of the Trump regime's authoritarian blitzkrieg, but they've remained strong on their central mission: Protect the god-king at any cost. That continued Friday in Virginia.
I waded in the dooming swamps for a couple hours after Friday's ruling came down. Such unfairness is difficult to accept or rationalize. You know things shouldn't be this way. It _feels_ wrong. But in a nation well into competitive authoritarian territory, this is how it goes. It's probably why the FBI this week stormed the offices of Virginia State Senator Louise Lucas, a prominent advocate for the state's redistricting plan who excels at making right wingers mad online.
Just as the last vestiges of Black political power in the former Confederacy are being snuffed out without any intervention from the courts, right-wing jurists are finding every reason to stop Democratic gerrymanders from taking hold in the country's race to the small-d democratic bottom. The U.S. Supreme Court back in March halted a perfectly legal and ordinary New York State gerrymander because it was deemed racist against white voters. The faith remains wretchedly bad.
This is a real chance for Abigail Spanberger to put the fear of god into her Republican opponents.
Elected Democrats went about their backburn gerrymander the right way. They asked and received the consent of the state's voters and they went ahead with the plan, which – unlike Republican gerrymanders – came with an expiration date. This was not good enough for the corrupt jurists on the Virginia Supreme Court (Attorney General Jay Jones says he'll fight the nakedly unconstitutional ruling). There's at least some reason to believe the Virginia justices who ruled against the redistricting plan did so because the measure did not win by a large enough margin. What margin would suffice? Well, I think we know the answer to that.
The good news, as you gleaned from this blog's headline, is that none of this matters on a practical level. There's plenty of data-based reason to believe Democrats were going to win three of the four districts involved in the Virginia gerrymander through sheer force of turnout and absolute white-hot fury and unprecedented disgust with the Trump regime and its pathetic and anti-American enablers. Republicans continue to water down solid red districts in states across the country without recognizing that the 2024 electorate fell to pieces immediately after reinstalling an insurrectionist into the White House. You might just hear the term dummymander quite a bit this fall.
Virginia Democrats Punched Back. Now Republicans Are Scared.It’s all part of life under competitive authoritarianism.Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter
I stand by my take, after shaking off the doom of Friday's Virginia Supreme Court ruling, that no gerrymander can save the Republican House majority in 2026. They can try to rig the fucking thing but they will fail. Just this week we saw a Democrat win by 21 points in a special state senate election in Michigan two years after Kamala Harris won that district by a single point. This, as Bad Faith Times subscribers know well, is part of a trend that is so often lost in mainstream media coverage of the current electorate (the other day an NPR report on Confederate gerrymandering concluded Republicans are now favored to retain their House majority. Who said that, exactly, was unclear.)
In today's BFT podcast I talked about the Virginia gerrymandering debacle. Become a BFT supporter to listen!
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