The Patriot Post® · Not So Fast, Spanberger

Welp, it was fun while it lasted.

Yesterday, after having hornswoggled enough Virginia voters into narrowly passing a referendum to radically redistrict their state from its current 6-to-5 Democrat advantage to a spectacularly imbalanced 10-to-1 steamrolling, Governor Abigail Spanberger and her ilk got a taste of their own judicial medicine.

As Fox News reports, “Virginia Circuit Court Judge Jack Hurley ruled Wednesday, one day after the Democrat redistricting referendum passed, that all votes for or against the proposed redistricting amendment were unconstitutional, citing rules that impose certain requirements that the referendum did not meet.”

So much for the high-fives, the hearty guffaws, and the champagne toasts.

As it turns out, the Democrats were really sloppy in how they rammed this referendum through. As former Virginia Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli noted, it was flawed on at least four fronts — in addition to being just a really sleazy, slippery, scummy thing to do to nearly half the state’s voters.

Cuccinelli explains that the referendum’s passage was invalid because it was originally taken up as an amendment during a special session of the General Assembly and failed to abide by numerous clearly stipulated procedural steps.

In addition, there’s the shape of the redistricting maps themselves. As spelled out in Virginia’s constitution, “Every electoral district shall be composed of contiguous and compact territory.” As Cuccinelli points out, “The proposed congressional maps violate this contiguity requirement (rather badly).”

Speaking of “rather badly,” what about the shamelessly biased language of the referendum itself? It read: “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?”

Talk about rigged. I mean, what kind of voter wouldn’t want to “restore fairness” to his state’s elections? Of course, “fairness” in this case meant rewarding the 46% of Virginians who voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election with representation in just one of the state’s 11 congressional districts.

Speaking of rigged, the early vote suggested that the referendum would go down to defeat. Then, Northern Virginia happened, and President Trump took to ALL CAPS: “A RIGGED ELECTION TOOK PLACE LAST NIGHT IN THE GREAT COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA! All day long Republicans were winning, the Spirit was unbelievable, until the very end when, of course, there was a massive ‘Mail In Ballot Drop!’ … As everyone knows, I am an extraordinarily brilliant person, and even I had no idea what the hell they were talking about in the Referendum.”

Heck, Virginia voters admitted they were confused by the ballot’s language. “I’m looking at this booth, and it has a big picture of our governor saying, ‘Don’t be fooled,’” said one voter. “She’s on TV every day saying, ‘Vote yes.’ But they’re making it look like she’s saying, ‘Vote no.’”

But, as I noted yesterday, Democrats do hardball politics better than Republicans, and they also do judicial obstruction and throat-punching better than Republicans. Not surprisingly, then, the state’s current attorney general, Democrat and murder fetishist Jay Jones, said his office would “immediately file an appeal.”

There was a time when Democrats abhorred gerrymandering — but that was merely a time when they hadn’t yet perfected the process. Alas, if it weren’t for double standards, Democrats wouldn’t have any standards. In 2018, for example, Barack Obama declared, “In America, politicians shouldn’t pick their voters, voters are supposed to pick their politicians.”

And again, in 2020, Obama lamented the gerrymander: “I think people don’t completely appreciate how much gerrymandering affects the outcome [of elections]. You can draw a district that almost guarantees one party is going to win instead of another because you have voter histories and you have a sense of where people are typically going to vote.”

This year, though, Obama cut campaign ads in Virginia in favor of gerrymandering while using the very same language he’d previously employed to denounce gerrymandering. “Help put our elections back on a level playing field,” he said, “and [WAIT FOR IT!] let voters decide — not politicians.”

After the vote, Obama lauded that slim majority of Virginians for having disenfranchised certain other Virginians. “Congratulations, Virginia! … Thanks for showing us what it looks like to stand up for our democracy and fight back.”

What a slippery snake this guy is. As our Mark Alexander quipped, “Obama was against gerrymandering before he was for it.”

It’s anybody’s guess what will ultimately happen, but the Virginia Supreme Court is expected to hear oral arguments in the case beginning this coming Monday. As for the ideological makeup of the seven-judge court, its members are appointed by the state’s General Assembly, a body that has historically been controlled by the Republicans. So take from that what you will.

But I’ll say this: Any court that can’t steel itself to come down hard against this sort of electoral trickery and treachery isn’t worth its black robes.