Readers in Virginia will know that April 21 marks the last day of well more than a month of voting on a ballot initiative that pertains to the recrafting of Congressional districts. The state is already partitioned into 11 Congressional districts. Each district sends one representative to the US House of Representatives.
Each of the 50 states is responsible for partitioning its own state into Congressional districts. There are 435 districts distributed across the 50 states with each district representing about 760,000 people as of the 2020 census. The country conducts a census every ten years and subsequently adjusts the number of districts assigned to each state. States like California, New York and Illinois have been losing population and are therefore expected to lose some number of districts after the 2030 census comes in. Losing districts amounts to losing seats in Congress. States like Texas, Tennessee and Florida are expected to gain seats in Congress after the 2030 census comes in.
It turns out that non-citizens get counted in the census, and it further turns out that non-citizens, including tens of millions of illegal aliens, tend to be concentrated in states that have set themselves up as “sanctuaries” for illegal aliens. The greater the number of illegal aliens in a given state —> the greater the population counted in the census —> the greater the number of seats assigned to a given state. Some observers suggest that states like California, New York and Illinois would collectively lose more than twenty seats were non-citizens not counted in the census.
Taken separately or together, decennial redistricting and illegal immigration make for heated politicking, but in 2026, the new leadership in the state of Virginia has jumped the gun. The leadership has gone out of its way to ignore regulations governing the redistricting process and has forced voters to vote on a new, proposed map of Congressional districts. The effort to realign districts is the subject of litigation, and the matter has gone all the way up the state supreme court. But, the court declined to adjudicate the matter without first allowing the electorate to vote on the matter.
The concern is that the state supreme court will affirm the new district map were the ballot initiative to succeed in the April 21 voting. Declining to adjudicate the matter before the voting proceeds amounts to abdication of its responsibility to maintain the integrity of electoral processes that are already in the books. Proceeding to affirm the new, proposed district maps would amount to an exercise in lawlessness.
Here is an image of the current district map:
https://www.virginiaredistricting.org/legdistricting/comments/plan/547/1
Here is an image of the proposed map:
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Both maps feature eleven districts. The greatest mass of Democrat-aligned voters is concentrated right outside of Washington DC in Alexandria and in Fairfax and Arlington counties. The proposed map anchors four of the eleven proposed Congressional districts in Alexandria, Fairfax county and Arlington county. Critics complain that these communities in Northern Virginia effectively end up lording it over rural counties in central Virginia.
As of 2024, the Virginia delegation in the US House of Representative has featured five Republicans and six Democrats. The Democrats who have proposed the new map understand that the delegation would shift to ten Democrats and one Republican were the new map to be adopted in time for elections in November 2026.
The political motivation is obvious: The Republicans hold a slim majority in the US House of Representatives. A shift of four seats alone would give the Democrats the majority. They would then set off on their principal project of impeaching the President, Donald Trump, and thereby tying up the energies of the Trump administration for its remaining two years.
Now, if you are a voter and you think Trump and Republicans are total Nazis, then you might be disposed to vote affirmatively to adopt the new, heavily-gerrymandered map. You might think that gerrymandering is a bad business, but Our Democracy™ is at stake! We therefore have to put “democratic norms” aside and do what’s expedient.
Another view, if you are a Democrat party insider, is that this gerrymandering exercise may prove to be the next thing to permanent. It may mark an important step toward securing political monopoly over federal policy and enforcement and may enable the Party to literally imprison Republican officials who currently hold elected or appointed offices. Obama alumni like Susan Rice go further and threaten parties in the private sector who have “enabled” Donald Trump:
[T]here will be an accountability agenda. Companies already are starting to hear they better preserve their documents. They better be ready for subpoenas. If they’ve done something wrong, they’ll be held accountable.
Democrat Cajun consigliere James Carville sketched in an April 16 podcast some of the Democratic party program that we have been hearing about for some years:
If the Democrats win the Presidency and both houses of Congress [in 2028], I think on day one, they should make Puerto Rico [and] DC a state, [and thereby secure four more Democrat-friendly seats in the Senate,] and they should expand the Supreme Court [from nine justices] to thirteen.
Fuck it. Eat our dust. [The Republicans have] done everything they could. They held up the 2020 election, … they’ve stolen Supreme Court seats, they’ve gerrymandered everything they can. And the only way to fight it is don’t run on it, don’t talk about it, just do it!
Meanwhile, quite a number of mailers have shown up in my mailbox. A few of them urge voters to vote affirmatively for the proposed district map—specifically to vote affirmatively in response to this Orwellian ballot formulation:
Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts [in order] to restore fairness in the upcoming elections [in November 2026], while ensuring Virginia’s standard redistricting process resumes for all future redistricting after the 2030 census?
One of the mailers illuminate this exact language. Because Our Democracy™!
Note the enticement to those voters who might understand that this redistricting exercise is illegal: The measure is “temporary,” whatever that means. And the measures promote “Fairness”! And, if you’re still in doubt, then invoke “Donald Trump!”
Democratic party luminaries such as Barack Obama have urged voters to approve of the new map.
Meanwhile, most of the mailers urge voters to vote against the ballot measure (and thus in favor of maintaining the current district map), and many of those mailers throw earlier pronouncements of Democratic party luminaries back in their faces:
I almost feel sorry for those voters who believe that Donald Trump and anyone who doesn’t want to go along with their program of open borders, industrialized NGO fraud, non-citizen voting, federally-subsidized abortions, and federally-subsidized gender surgeries are Nazis. If you think other people are Nazis, then maybe a little lawlessness is more than justified. But, if you do believe that the great mass of people who maintain sometimes-contrary, sometimes-amenable policy preferences are deserving of the same rights and dignity as oneself, then lawlessness is just lawlessness. And, it’s worse if the judiciary sanctions it, all the while passing it off as just and legal.
This Virginia redistricting stunt is just another example of lawlessness being passed off as an exercise in Our Democracy™. It’s a bad business.
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