Virginia voters on Tuesday approved a state constitutional amendment that permits a deliberate partisan gerrymandering of their state’s congressional district maps to ensure that their delegation in the U.S. House of Representatives is overwhelmingly Democratic — until the maps are redrawn after the next U.S. Census. By then, the reasoning goes, Donald Trump will be out of office and some degree of sanity will have returned to our national politics.
This effort in Virginia is a direct response to Trump’s inveigling of Republican-led state legislatures around the country to gerrymander their own congressional maps to give Republicans a lock on their control of the U.S. House.
Here is the question that was before Virginia voters on Tuesday:
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?
Here’s the present landscape in Virginia: The state has 11 congressional districts, with Democrats holding six and Republicans five. The coming gerrymandering of these congressional districts could give Democrats 10 seats and leave the Republicans with just one. In normal times, I would like to think, Democrats would not contemplate such an odious action.
But the Trump era is not normal times. The president’s corrupting influence is pervasive, and it needs to be fought in all quarters and at all times by the right-minded citizens of this country. That is what is happening in Virginia.
Unfortunately, Tuesday’s vote is not the last word on the matter. Virginia Republicans, being fastidious servants of the Dark Lord, are fighting the redistricting in the courts, and the Supreme Court of Virginia could yet nullify the effect of Tuesday’s vote by ruling that the whole constitutional-amendment effort to redraw the congressional district maps violates the Virginia Constitution.
But for the moment, a majority of Virginia voters, barely more than 51 percent, has told the legislature that it can proceed with gerrymandering the congressional districts.
What did Donald Trump think would happen when he launched this corrupt scheme? Did he think Democratic-led states would just sit by and not respond in kind to partisan gerrymandering by Republican-led states? Oh, wait. He doesn’t think properly; so he didn’t think the matter through sufficiently to see that he would be triggering a kind of arms race. Pretty typical of the man. California and a number of other Democratic-led states have done or are doing what Virginia is doing. Because Trump cannot think straight, he started a war that he is not going to win.
Sound familiar? It should.
Democracy Warrior 