By Judson Berger
Friday, May 15, 2026
For a brief period last Friday, Virginia Democrats seemed
to take the fatal judicial blow against their mid-decade gerrymandering push in
stride. “We respect the decision of the Supreme Court of Virginia,” Virginia
House Speaker Don Scott said after the court’s ruling.
The mood of restraint and civic sobriety in Richmond was
not to last.
By Monday, Scott and other state Democrats were party to a long-shot appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court
seeking to block the decision and preserve one of the most extreme
redistricting efforts in the country. The emergency stay application, backed by the NAACP, was unconventional in that it asked
the top federal court to scrutinize the decision of a state court on state
constitutional matters. In their reply Thursday, Republicans called it “extraordinary”
and “baseless.” The Supreme Court rejected the application the next day, as
expected. But Democrats’ SCOTUS filing was plain vanilla compared with the
other options floated this past week to end-run the ruling.
As the pendulum swung from calm resignation to feverish
fantasy, Democrats toyed with a break-glass plan to lower the
retirement age for Virginia Supreme Court justices and force a wholesale
replacement of the bench, per the New York Times. According to the New Republic, Democrats have since cooled to the
scheme; Governor Abigail Spanberger said she doesn’t support it and reportedly indicated that elections will proceed with the existing map. But the
responses underscore how desperately the redistricting wars are being fought across the country, and
how the left’s rank-and-file outrage over their side’s setbacks is unlikely to
settle soon.
Jamelle Bouie wrote in the Times that it was a “mistake” from the
outset to respect the court’s decision, which found that Democrats violated
procedure by seeking initial legislative approval after early voting in
last year’s election had begun, when an election is supposed to be held between
two legislative votes. Taking issue with the court’s counting early voting in
its definition of “election,” Bouie called for Democrats to “fight back in the
name of the people.” At the national level, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has vowed a “massive
Democratic redistricting counteroffensive,” not just in Virginia.
Even with the Virginia court loss and the U.S. Supreme
Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, the political environment
still favors Democrats in House races this year (and . . . as long as President
Trump talks like this about voters’ financial concerns,
that is unlikely to change). But the narrative taking hold in progressive
circles is that the Virginia saga is a crystalline example of Democrats’ being
unwilling or unable to go as far as Republicans to break the rules and get
their way.
This, in turn, puts yet more pressure on elected
officials to go to extremes to prove the narrative wrong.
Charles C. W. Cooke, weighing in on The Editors, said he’s pleased to see the Virginia
forced-retirement plan fizzle but described the flirtation with court-packing and adjacent schemes at the state and federal
levels as a dangerous game: “I do think it gives us an indication of where the
Democratic Party is.” In The Week, our editors warn against the “primal partisan
rage” driving the gerrymandering fights from both sides.
Last week’s ruling was, without question, an embarrassing
— and costly — outcome for state Democrats. They should not forget, though,
that they risked exactly this post-referendum scenario. As National Review’s post-ruling editorial recalled,
it was Democrats who “opposed the court’s deciding the question before the
vote.” The hope was that “the justices would be too cowardly to overturn a
ballot measure that had already been voted on, and they lost their big gamble.”
In closing, Charlie proposes a reliable exercise for
progressives angry about the timing of the decision: Imagine if it were Trump.
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