Virginia’s Gerrymandering War Moves to the Courts

Virginia voters have narrowly ratified a preposterous gerrymander designed by the state's Democratic legislature.

Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, gave me his opinion on this outcome: “Virginia's redrawn map smothers political diversity. Rural interests are swallowed up by progressive urban dominance. We have been lectured for years about political gerrymandering by the left. They hate it, until it delivers them power.”

The truly tortured map is likely to turn the state’s 6–5 Democratic advantage in the U.S. House into a 10–1 advantage. Northern Virginia’s population of federal bureaucrats and Beltway bandits will dominate the majority of the state’s House delegation. One district will stretch in a narrow corridor from Reagan National Airport near D.C. all the way to Williamsburg. The result would make Chicago Democrats — whose mapwork inspired their Virginia counterparts — proud.

But the battle isn’t over yet. The Supreme Court of Virginia punted on the constitutionality of the new map and allowed the referendum to go forward. But in the coming days, it will hear the legal challenges against the process.

Those arguments are:

(1) The legislature violated the state’s constitution by keeping a special session open for nearly two years, a move a local judge who heard the case labeled a “blatant abuse of power.”

(2) Virginia law requires that constitutional amendments be passed at least 90 days before any election in which the people ratify them. Lower courts had initially blocked the redistricting process on these grounds.

(3) The gerrymander improperly tossed out the work of the 2020 voter-approved bipartisan redistricting commission in the middle of the decade.

(4) The language on the ballot was blatantly biased in claiming that the referendum's goal was “to restore fairness” in upcoming elections, which presupposed that the bipartisan commission’s map was unfair.

While Virginia’s high court is usually deferential to the legislature, there is a reasonable chance it will decide that, after this gerrymandering process, the legislature has gone too far.