Democrats nationwide are furious that the Virginia Supreme Court did its job this week and struck down the results of the Old Dominion’s blatantly illegal redistricting referendum, denying the party the 10-to-1 gerrymandered map it thought it had won.
But for all the outraged sturm und drang and cries of racism, the Left is offering no coherent legal argument as to why the decision was wrong. Instead, they are offering what sounds like a lot of slam poetry.
Take the reaction of Rep. Jaime Raskin, D-Md., to the decision: "Today, in an outrageous outburst of right-wing judicial activism…the Virginia Supreme Court has struck down the will of the voters. But democracy won’t end with right-wingers in black robes."
I think now is when we are supposed to snap our fingers and say, "Far out, man."
As to the actual legal efforts, they are so lax and lazy that the official appeal filed by Virginia Solicitor General’s office after the decision misspelled both the words, "Senator," opting for "Sentator," and better yet, "Virginia," appears as "Virgnia,"
They are not, I’m afraid, sending their best.
The crux of the case came down to timing, with the court ruling that Democrats rushed the referendum and did not allow a required intervening election between proposing a constitutional amendment and the voters deciding on it. Notably, Democrats don’t even deny that this is precisely what they did.
In retrospect, even with the narrow 4-3 decision, it now looks astonishing that Democrats spent $70 million and the lion’s share of new Democrat Gov. Abigail Spanberger's political capital on a campaign that won them the battle but lost them the war.
This disaster was avoidable for Democrats. Republicans even offered them an offramp prior to the vote, asking this same Supreme Court to rule before votes and money were potentially wasted. But the Democrats were desperate to proceed.
Now, some on the Left are gnashing their teeth, demanding to know why the court let the election happen, even though they were the ones who begged for it.
It is clear now, that Democrats, fresh off of big off-year election wins, thought they would win the referendum by a big enough margin that the court would be all but shamed into respecting the result. Had "Yes," won by the 12 points that Spanberger won by last year, that might have happened.
In fact, it is the very closeness of the eventual result, in which ‘Yes,’ edged ‘No,’ 51-49, that proves the Supreme Court was not just defending the law, but the voters as well.
In the final month of the election, as voters became more aware of what the redistricting actually did, that it gave bright blue Northern Virginia control of almost every seat, the polls tightened from what looked like an easy "Yes" win to a coin toss.
Of course, the whole point of the law requiring that amendments get an intervening election before being put to the voters is there to ensure that those voters have enough time and information to fully understand what they are voting on.
That was always going to be a problem for Democrats in this effort. It's why they never showed a picture of their new Frankenstein map, or mentioned that it gave 90% of the state’s seats to Democrats, even though 45% of the population is Republican.
They needed to slam this thing through as fast as possible, with as little discussion as possible by screaming bloody murder about racism, Jim Crow, and Texas gerrymandering, even though the people being disenfranchised in Virginia, or Virgnia, if you prefer, were mainly working class Whites.
The whole thrust of the $70 million "Yes" campaign was, "This is an emergency, Republicans are destroying democracy, we have to break the rules, but don’t worry it's just temporary."
Thankfully, the Virginia Supreme Court settled this matter on the basis of the law, not on the imaginary emergency of Donald Trump presiding in the Oval Office.
Democrats can complain all they want about the court’s decision being political. There is no evidence of that and fair courts cut both ways, as President Trump found out when the U.S. Supreme Court axed his tariffs, and many expect a further rebuke in the upcoming birthright citizenship decision.
Democrats are desperate to frame this as four unelected judges overturning the will of the people. Nothing could be further from the truth, because what they actually found, rightfully, was the people were given neither the time, nor the information needed to exercise that will under the law.
The Virginia Supreme Court didn’t just uphold the law in regard to constitutional amendments, it proved why those very laws are so vital. And there is not a single thing that the Democrats, who rolled the dice and lost, can do about it.
