The Virginia redistricting referendum that passed narrowly Tuesday, which would allow the Democratic-controlled legislature to redraw congressional maps and shift the state’s congressional delegation from a six-to-five Democratic advantage to something approaching ten-to-one, was blocked from certification almost immediately by a circuit court judge and is heading to the Virginia Supreme Court for a ruling that Ken Cuccinelli, national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative and former Virginia attorney general, predicted will come quickly and will invalidate the referendum on state constitutional grounds.
Cuccinelli joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to explain why he believes the referendum’s passage is not the end of the story despite Democrats including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries publicly celebrating and already threatening similar redistricting campaigns in Florida. He said the Virginia legislature’s process in passing the proposed amendment violated the Virginia Constitution in four distinct ways, some of which are so clear-cut he believes the seven-member Virginia Supreme Court, which has four Republican appointees and three Democrat appointees, could rule against the referendum seven to zero on at least some of the issues.
The most straightforward violations involve the procedural requirements Virginia imposes on constitutional amendments. The state constitution requires that a proposed amendment pass through the General Assembly twice, with an intervening state election between the two passages. Democrats wanted to count last year’s election as the intervening election, but voting in that election began on September 19th and the amendment was not passed for the first time until Halloween, after more than a million Virginians had already cast ballots. Cuccinelli said even the math-impaired can recognize that passing a proposed amendment after the election you want to use as the intervening election does not satisfy the constitutional requirement. The second clear violation involves the ninety-day rule, which requires that the second passage occur at least ninety days before the amendment is submitted to voters. The second passage happened January 19th and voting began March 6th, which is less than sixty days, not ninety. Additionally, the special legislative session in which the amendment was first passed was called specifically to address the state budget, and adding a new subject to a special session requires a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly. Democrats knew they could not get a two-thirds majority, so they simply proceeded without one.
Cuccinelli described the overall legislative conduct as gangster-style brazenness, noting that Democrats spent three to four times as much money as opponents of the referendum and still only won by two to three points, despite needing to overcome a 2020 constitutional amendment that had been approved by a two-to-one margin of Virginia voters to establish the nonpartisan redistricting commission the new referendum is designed to dismantle. He said briefing is due at the Virginia Supreme Court immediately and oral argument on two of the four constitutional issues is scheduled for the following Monday, meaning the litigation will move quickly and a ruling will likely come in May. He said the court is motivated to act quickly because everyone involved needs to know what the district lines actually are well before the election.
He said Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares’s Democratic predecessor Jay Jones, who called the circuit court judge who blocked certification an activist judge, was displaying a remarkable lack of self-awareness given the Democratic Party’s historical posture toward the activist judge label. He predicted the constitutional violations are clear enough that all three Democrat-appointed justices on the Virginia Supreme Court, whom he described as better jurists than the standard set by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on the US Supreme Court, may join the Republican appointees in ruling against the referendum rather than acting in a nakedly partisan fashion.
The conversation also addressed the federal indictments announced this week against the Southern Poverty Law Center, which Cuccinelli said he has long considered an organization that abandoned genuine civil rights work decades ago in favor of a fundraising model he called fund the hate to fight the hate. He noted that the organization’s annual revenue jumped from fifty-two million dollars before the Charlottesville events to over two hundred and thirty-three million dollars afterward, a surge that raises obvious questions about how the organization used the Charlottesville narrative to solicit donations. Reports of offshore accounts suggest total assets may approach eight hundred million dollars. Cuccinelli said the SPLC had effectively embedded itself in the Biden Justice Department, virtually directing policy in some areas, a relationship that traces back through the Obama and Clinton administrations as well. He said he has long tried to persuade people the SPLC has defamed to bring defamation cases in Alabama, where the organization is headquartered, but that no one wanted to litigate against an organization with that level of financial resources. He said that calculus may now be changing, and that donors who were misled about how their contributions were being used may have grounds of their own to pursue.