Spanberger’s Spectacular Gerrymandering Faceplant

The evening of April 21 there were a lot of smiles to be seen on the faces of Virginia Democrats. The voters of the Old Dominion had gone to the polls and approved an amendment to the Commonwealth’s constitution allowing a radically redistricted congressional map. No one was happier than Virginia’s new Democrat Governor, Abigail Spanberger, who had reversed her position on partisan gerrymandering to dramatically increase her party’s power in Congress. Like her Democrat accomplices in the General Assembly she assumed that the challenges to the amendment under consideration by Virginia’s Supreme Court (SCOVA) would immediately collapse once “the people had spoken.”

Spanberger was wrong, of course, as she discovered last Friday when SCOVA nullified the referendum. Justice D. Arthur Kelsey wrote in the majority opinion, “We hold that the legislative process employed to advance this proposal violated Article XII, Section 1 of the Constitution of Virginia. This constitutional violation incurably taints the resulting referendum vote and nullifies its legal efficacy.” To paraphrase an expression that many readers may have heard from their mothers, that wiped the smile right off Spanberger’s face. The elaborate strategy pursued by the governor and her fellow Democrats in the General Assembly to trick the voters as well as SCOVA was too clever by half. As former Governor Glenn Youngkin summed it up:

Abigail Spanberger, Don Scott, Louise Lucas and all their friends knowingly violated the Virginia Constitution … They strongly argued for the VA Supreme Court to “wait” until after the referendum so their flood of money from national democrats could fund their brazen dishonesty and trick voters to “restore fairness”, and then claim “the will of the people” when the VA Supreme Court would undoubtedly strike down their unconstitutional attempt to disenfranchise millions of Virginians.

Their most egregious offense was treating the voters like morons. They jettisoned a balanced congressional map with a partisan split of 6 Democrats and 5 Republicans. Then, in the name of “fairness,” they replaced it with a monstrosity whose partisan split was 10 Democrats and 1 Republican. Finally, they asked the voters to answer “Yes” or “No” to this deceptive ballot question in the April 21 referendum: “Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections, while ensuring Virginia’s standard redistricting process resumes for all future redistricting after the 2030 census?” “Yes,” skirted by at 51.7 to 48.3 percent.