Virginia Supreme Court Tosses Map; Politics Of The United States Fight Widens
The Virginia Supreme Court struck down a voter-approved congressional map this week, a ruling that immediately pulled politics of the united states into another redistricting fight. Virginia Democrats said they will appeal, while Gavin Newsom posted that Virginia's voter-approved maps are thrown out and that MAGA has rigged the system.
David Brooks called the ruling part of a longer breakdown in the rules that once kept redistricting tied to the census, saying, “Trump blew through that restraint.” He added, “People have always been doing gerrymandering,” but said the pace worsened in the 2010s and again in the 2020s.
Virginia Democrats and Newsom
Newsom wrote, “Virginia's voter-approved maps are thrown out. MAGA has rigged the system.” The post came after the court action and turned the Virginia decision into a broader national talking point for Democrats who have argued the fight over district lines is no longer limited to one state.
Virginia Democrats said they will appeal the ruling, keeping the map in dispute even after the court struck it down. For voters and candidates in Virginia, that means the congressional boundaries remain unsettled while the legal challenge moves ahead.
Brooks on the 50/50 House
Brooks said the country is now “stuck in a pseudo-democracy,” where voters do not usually have “the actual power to throw out a party that's doing badly.” He also said, “And so this democratic check is more or less gone,” and added, “And so this is just how democracy ends.”
He tied that view to the House, saying there are “very few swing seats” and that the chamber is probably locked in at least for the near future with a “50/50 House” split. Ruth Marcus said, “This was a terrible week for democracy,” and pointed to Indiana as the only state where Republicans stood up to pressure to redistrict in the middle of the cycle.
Indiana and the midcycle push
Marcus said Donald Trump financed and fueled an effort involving Indiana, placing that state at the center of the fight she described. Her comment followed Brooks’ warning that redistricting had once been restrained by the idea that it happened only once every 10 years after the census, a norm he said Trump broke.
The immediate effect of the Virginia ruling is an appeal, and the broader effect is a new opening in the national redistricting battle that both parties are already using as evidence in their fight over House control. Virginia now sits in that struggle while the map stays in court.
