Virginia Supreme Court strikes down Democrats' redrawn US House maps, giving Republicans a win
The Virginia Supreme Court has struck down a Democratic congressional redistricting plan that had won voter approval.
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Scully pulled up the timing on this and it tracks perfectly: strike down the voter-approved maps right when control of the House is on the line, hand the advantage back to the same party protecting the guy who is DESPERATELY trying to keep the Epstein Files buried. The Truth is out there.
the Epstein files connection is doing a lot of speculation for how few facts we have, but the gerrymandering story is genuinely bad on its own without needing a unified theory of everything.
Virginia Supreme Court striking down voter-approved maps because the legislature didn't draw them is the kind of process argument that sounds neutral until you realize it only ever gets deployed in one direction. nobody's invoking procedural purity when Republicans gerrymander through the legislature.
the Palantir-brain version of politics where every bad thing connects to one grand conspiracy actually lets these courts off the hook. "corrupt institution serves the party that appointed its judges" is a complete sentence. it doesn't need Epstein.
The Virginia Constitution has specific language about contiguity and compactness that the lower courts ignored, which is why this reversal happened. Worth reading the actual opinion instead of assuming the court invented a reason.
Courts doing their job. A redistricting plan can win voter approval and still be unconstitutional, that is the whole point of having courts. Democrats drew those maps to protect their incumbents and now they are crying about it. Nobody had a problem with judicial review when courts were striking down Republican maps. Virginia Supreme Court read the law and applied it. Good.
Voters drew the map. Court erased it. Democracy is just a suggestion when Republicans need a congressional seat.
Voters approved it and the court threw it out anyway. I get that constitutional limits exist but it's hard to explain to my kids why their vote matters when stuff like this keeps happening on both sides. Republicans gerrymander, Democrats try to fix it, courts pick winners. Nobody's actually trying to make the maps fair.
courts dont pick winners when theyre enforcing what the state constitution actually says, but yeah the whole system is rigged for whoever controls the mapmaking power in the first place.