Ironies in Old Dominion

Sweet Virginia hasn’t soured yet.

In usual aristocratic fashion, the Commonwealth’s nobility of the robe has delivered us from the tyranny of short-sighted rabble.

The Virginia Supreme Court’s strike down of last month’s redistricting referendum was a quaking decision that muddied partisanship, ideology, and the normally fine-grooved channels of X discourse. The ruling was, as in all good politics, abound with ironies.

The forthright result of the overrule gives Republicans—America’s closest approximation of the status-preserving Tory Party—what it treasures most besides cutting capital taxes: an excuse. Just as conservatives secretly long for elite admiration, these drippy defenders of tradition also harbor a primal need to burn and bury procedural norms.

Within weeks after Virginia’s demo-pproving the constitutional amendment permitting mid-decade redistricting, red states like Florida and Tennessee responded in kind, delicately carving congressional fractals to maximize GOP vote share. The High Court’s spike isn’t going to deter this push. The daisy chain of grievance must keep generating new links. The Old Dominion district-recut campaign was itself a parry to Texas’s redraw, which was a reciprocation to the Census Bureau’s (alleged) miscalculation that left Democratic states overcounted. Which itself was an error caused by the difficulty of summing heads during a pandemic, but also partially due to the Trump Administration’s interference, so the off-count was just fair play in response to… and on and on and on and on it goes, back centuries to the imposition of the Stamp Act.

Forget all the high-flown middle school rhetoric of liberal democracy, the dignity of man, the folkish wisdom of the upright voter: politics is petty reprisals all the way down.

Republicans may have uncorked the Kirkland champagne après the Friday morning invalidation. But the victory—or more accurately, bail out—may prove short-lived. The Grand Old Dominion Party is about as organized and effective as a peewee soccer team; its candidates frequently perform worse than an abbot running for Président de la République française. In the end, the Party’s scorched behind was hoisted out of the disenfranchising flames by a technocratic bureaucracy at a remove from public passion. Who’d have imagined: Republicans toasting judicial activism! This newfound respect for democratically immune commissars may even continue if the EPA finds “Gavin Newsom 2028” billboards threaten whooping crane habitats.

Democrats, meanwhile, were waylaid by an institution that, in normal circumstances, unquestioningly affords legal patina to its policies. An unchallengeable body of cordoned decide-ocrats, whose views were molded in the most liberal pedagogical establishments, unilaterally annul a blue measure? Like Hercules with Hydra’s blood, liberal technocracy wrenches its own works. Che sorpresa!

The petard-hoisting wasn’t over. “Corrupting money in politics” remains a Democratic bugabear, despite its candidates consistently outspending the opposition. Yet, the ostensible cashphobic party poured drams of dough—over $50 million by most measures—promoting the measure. The month leading up to ballot day was little distinguishable from October in a presidential-elec year. Every single YouTube video opened with a 15-second ad of Barack Obama exhorting you to stick it to MAGA neanderthals. Stacks of mailers packed my mailbox every day. And the texts—Dear Lord Almighty, the texts! Every minute of every hour of every day, an all-caps imploration to save Virginia by letting prog-pols re-arrange the congressional map like a dyslexic child struggling with a jigsaw puzzle.

Not since Vietnam has the Democratic Party overwhelmingly firebombed a place to influence hearts and minds. As with intimidating Ho Chi Minh, it was all for naught.

The dryest just desert came at the expense of the Democrats’ new favorite thingamajig: early voting. Adopted to make it easier for wage-slaves to vote for more EBT credits, the gimmick has, like all welfare connivances, expanded well beyond the scope. Election Day no longer exists; it’s Election Season, with up to a month and a half to hit the polls.

The Virginia Constitution stipulates that amendments must be considered in two General Assembly sessions, the first wrapping before an election. Since the redistrict amendment was pitched while early voting was underway last fall, the Court nixed the entire process, finding it illegal from stem to stern.

Now the scramble is on for the party of rigid institutionalism to pink-slip the entire Court, subsuming the judiciary into an appendage of the legislature. Somewhere along Masons Neck, a guttural cry rings out.

“Haste makes waste” is a good summation of why the Democrats’ partisan play came a cropper. But the depressed Dems shouldn’t stay begloomed for long. Republicans, as the panting Stupid Party, will sit on their laurels, content with eeking out a win via lawsuit, rather than having to convince voters of anything.