Virginia's Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday on whether Democrats actually followed their own state constitution when they passed their referendum to gerrymander the state, and guess what? The justices didn't seem convinced.
Virginia Democrats voted to disenfranchise Republican voters last week, amending the state constitution to strip redistricting authority from a nonpartisan commission and hand it back to the General Assembly, which Democrats currently control.
Under the new map, Virginia's congressional delegation would flip from six Democrats and five Republicans to 10 Democrats and one Republican, changing the most fair map into the most gerrymandered. But the legal question before the court is not a policy question; it’s whether the General Assembly complied with constitutional and procedural requirements when it advanced the amendment. Right out of the gate, the pro-gerrymander lawyers conceded under bench questioning that the legislature didn't follow its own internal rules.
That’s a rough start, and it got worse.
The lower courts have been skeptical about whether Democrats complied with the procedures.
But the Democrats’ lawyer, Matthew Seligman, argued to the state’s high court, “The General Assembly complied with every step that the Constitution requires.
“The circuit court attempted to interfere with the democratic process by halting it,” he said. “The challengers here now try to overturn the result of that democratic process.”
Right off the bat, a justice dismissed Seligman’s argument about the people of Virginia deciding the referendum and underscored the irregularities of the process.
The other justices who asked questions largely pushed Seligman over tougher procedural issues and generally had easier queries for the GOP’s lawyer
Notably, fewer than half of the state’s seven high court justices actually asked questions during oral arguments.
Another procedural issue raised involved the General Assembly neglecting to publish the proposed amendment 90 days in advance, then retroactively repealing that regulation.
“There are lots of voters across the Commonwealth who are not totally educated on everything going on in Richmond, and they need time,” Thomas McCarthy, the lawyer representing Republicans, argued. “The Commonwealth needs time for the whole thing to be aired out.”
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“Sounds like we’re on solid ground. Justices didn’t like that early voting had started prior to the first passage of the amendment by the general assembly. Also, made it clear that what happened last Tuesday has no bearing on the case before them today,” Wren Williams, a Republican delegate in Virginia, noted on X. “VA Constitution requires an ‘intervening election’ between the first passage of the bill by the general assembly and the second passage of the constitutional amendment language by the general assembly.”
But one problem Democrats face is early voting, Williams says.
The Dems need early voting to be a single day now, not 45 days, for this to work. If it’s a single day, then it doesn’t matter that early voting started before the Dems passed the amendment in the general assembly the first time, because they did it “before” the election.
If Election Day is not a single day, and the first day of early voting is the beginning of the “intervening election,” then the general assembly did NOT pass the amendment language before the intervening election. The election had already started and millions of votes had been cast by then in late October.
We’ll wait to see what the Court says. I’m sure they won’t delay very long in their ruling.
That would be hilarious, wouldn’t it?
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