by Jonathan Turley via jonathanturley.org,
“Eff around and find out”: That taunt from Hakeem Jeffries celebrating Virginia’s gerrymander did not age well.
On Friday, the House minority leader found out that Virginia’s Supreme Court was not quite as gleeful as he about Democrats’ attempt to virtually eliminate Republican representation in the purple state.
The court just cooked the party’s infamous lobster, a district over 100 miles long that was designed to help devour the GOP’s slender majority in the House of Representatives.
It also cooked the ambitions of Gov. Abigail Spanberger and the Democratic establishment, which tossed aside any pretense of principle in a raw political gambit.
The resulting faceplant is nothing short of legendary: Spanberger’s Democrats have succeeded in alienating half of the state.
For the governor, the court’s decision was particularly embarrassing.
Before assuming power, Spanberger denounced gerrymandering as “detrimental to our democracy and weakens the individual voices that form our electorates.”
She ran as a moderate, but Spanberger immediately turned sharply left once in office and called for the most extreme gerrymander in the nation.
The court found that effort was not only unconstitutional, but “wholly unprecedented in Virginia’s history.”
It characterized the state’s position as “a story of the tail wagging the dog that has no tail.”
While some of us had previously expressed skepticism over the rushed effort to circumvent the state constitution, the media almost exclusively relied on liberal experts who predicted the new districts would be upheld.
It was a calculated risk for Democrats, who have now burned their bridges with Virginia conservative and Republican voters.
As Winston Churchill said, “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”
Exhilarating and unforgettable: In a purple state where politicians often require crossover votes to prevail, the redistricting push was not just partisan but personal for voters.
National Democrats will soon “find out” whether Jeffries was right to prematurely celebrate a victory that seemed to secure his anticipated elevation to Speaker of the House.
The party is facing a potentially catastrophic reversal of fortune.
When Democrats declared a gerrymandering war, some of us warned that the party, with its already heavily gerrymandered blue states, had far more to lose than the GOP did.
It was particularly comical when Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey pledged to join the redistricting fray, even though her state is so badly gerrymandered that it’s elected zero Republicans to the House since the 1990s.
Virginia, a state long opposed to gerrymandering, has been considered the fairest state in the country, with a distribution of congressional seats that closely matches its partisan divide.
Once Spanberger sought to eradicate Republican representation, total war broke out — and now red states like Florida and Tennessee have moved forward with their own redistricting.
On top of the fact that GOP states have more room for partisan gerrymandering, the Virginia Supreme Court decision comes on the heels of the US Supreme Court’s ban on racial gerrymandering.
That means a dozen or more Democratic districts could now be deemed unconstitutional — and Louisiana and Mississippi are moving to redistrict in line with the Supreme Court’s decision.
The result could be a dramatic shift in districts favoring the GOP.
To make matters worse for the Democratic Party, a new census in 2030 will correct the mistakes that erroneously awarded them multiple districts after the 2020 census.
Those corrections, and the ongoing exodus from high-tax blue states to booming red ones, could translate into even more congressional gains for the GOP.
That prospect of a political apocalypse has Democratic strategists pushing for radical changes in Washington before it’s too late.
Top priority: packing the Supreme Court as soon as they retake power.
As Virginia has shown, an independent court can unravel the best-laid plans.
Democratic politicians, pundits and professors have been openly pushing for expanding the high court to 13 members with four new liberal additions, in order to rubber-stamp the radical changes needed to keep the party in power.
James Carville recently told Democratic politicians that they have no choice but to pack the court, declaring “F–k it . . . Just do it.”
He suggested, however, that they might not want to tell the voters.
“Don’t run on it. Don’t talk about it,” he said. “Just do it.”
Last week, Jeffries declared the Supreme Court “illegitimate” as he blasted its ban on racial gerrymandering.
After the Virginia court’s ruling, the frustrated Democratic establishment is ever more likely to echo him — and to go beyond.
Many Democrats are now “all in” with this radical agenda.
With the courts declaring their redistricting efforts unconstitutional, it is the constitutional system itself that will now have to go.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
