Virginia Dems’ Last Hope Of Saving Rigged Maps ‘Is Dead’

Virginia Democrats’ last-ditch effort to save their rigged congressional maps is DOA. The commonwealth’s far-left governor has called the time of death.

“It’s really over. The body is still flopping around on the table, but it’s dead,” former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli told me Thursday in an interview on The Dan O’Donnell Show on NewsTalk 1130 WISN in Milwaukee. 

Cuccinelli, who serves as national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative, expects the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday to bury the Democrats’ desperate application for stay without comment. If this delightful melodrama had a soundtrack it would be Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence.” Gov. Abigail Spanberger, Democrat L. Louise Lucas, the nasty, loudmouthed state senator under a cloud of corruption, and the rest of the insufferable pols once so cocksure all wearing the black garb of mourning and mouthing the words as they lower the coffin filled with the aborted remains of their gerrymandering plan into a fresh grave.

“You’ll probably hear from the Supreme Court [Friday], but what you’ll hear is a great big nothingness,” Cuccinelli said. “I don’t think a single justice is going to have a single thing to say about this other than that they will pass on the opportunity to even weigh in.”

‘Unprecedented Manner’

Earlier this week, Virginia Attorney General Jay “Two Bullets” Jones and lawyers for Virginia Democrats begged SCOTUS to do what it generally doesn’t: overrule a state supreme court decision. Still stinging over the Virginia Supreme Court’s 4-3 ruling a week ago stopping the gerrymandering attempt, Dems hope the nation’s high court will let them go ahead with their power trip. 

As The Federalist’s Breccan Thies reported, the Virginia Supreme Court found Democrats had violated the commonwealth’s constitution in their attempt to amend it to ram through a new congressional map. The court rejected the “unprecedented” way in which the Democrat state legislative majority passed the resolution setting up the April election on the amendment, which was narrowly approved despite an egregiously misleading ballot question and supporters outspending referendum opponents 3 to 1. 

“In this case, the Commonwealth submitted a proposed constitutional amendment to Virginia voters in an unprecedented manner that violated the intervening-election requirement in Article XII, Section 1 of the Constitution of Virginia,” the court wrote. “This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void. For this reason, the congressional district maps issued by this Court in 2021 pursuant to Article II, Section 6-A of the Constitution of Virginia remain the governing maps for the upcoming 2026 congressional elections.”

Democrats thought the court unfair for stopping their unfair gerrymander, aimed at taking four U.S. House seats from Republicans, expanding Democrats’ representative advantage from 6 to 5 to 10 to 1. 

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which has long endorsed race-based, affirmative action gerrymanders, filed an amicus brief on Wednesday asserting that the state Supreme Court’s ruling disregards the will of the 3.1 million voters who supported the referendum. 

“The NAACP will not stand by idly in the face of this blatant attempt to overrule the will of Virginia voters,” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said in a statement, disregarding the will of the people who would like to see Virginia’s constitution adhered to. 

‘Hoisted Up On Their Own Petard’

Curiously, Virginia Democrats are trying to make the case before SCOTUS that federal law “expressly fixes a single day for the ‘election’ of Representatives and Delegates to Congress.” They’re right. It’s the same argument Republicans are making in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court aiming to end the months-long election season of early voting that liberals love so much. Virginia Democrats in charge of the government gave voters 45-day election seasons. 

As The Federalist’s Elle Purnell noted in a piece mocking the Virginia Dems’ cynical legal argument, left-wing news outlet Vox cautioned that Jones was shooting Democrat interests in the foot by asking the Supreme Court to weigh in on that claim. 

Cuccinelli said Jones’ out-of-state attorneys argued before the Virginia Supreme Court that “voters vote early at their own risk.” 

“And this is the same party who’s been telling us that early voting is holy writ for so long,” the former AG said. “And it is amusing that they got hoisted up on their own petard in that regard.”

Reality has set in for Spanberger, whose far-left policy agenda has repeatedly crashed into reality in her opening months as Virginia governor. The new maps and their grandiose designs of helping the Democratic Party take back the House this midterm won’t be in place this year, even if the U.S. Supreme Court grants a stay. Spanberger told Virginia media that the deadline to have the congressional maps in place has passed. 

“…[W]hen it comes to the execution of elections, no matter the outcome in that case, we will be running our elections beginning next month with early voting on the current maps that we have,” she told WTOP News. 

Cuccinelli called the Democrats’ campaign to redraw Virginia’s maps “gangster legislating.” It definitely woke up red states that had been sleep-walking on the subject of mid-decade redistricting, escalating the gerrymandering war. Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessee are all moving toward redrawing their maps, driven by the Democrats’ Virginia gambit and the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling all but ending race-based gerrymanders that have long been the political tools of Democrats. 

“So [Democrats] successfully ticked everybody off and got a bunch of other states motivated to get going and then lost their four seats in Virginia,” Cuccinelli said, laughing at the left’s hubris. 

It all amounted to a “great big nothingness” for the scheming Democrats, to borrow from Cuccinelli’s colorful turn of phrase. 

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Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.