When he served as a member of the Virginia House of Representatives in 2020, Schuyler VanValkenburg spoke passionately in support of a bill that would create a bipartisan committee charged with drawing the commonwealth’s political maps. The idea was to take politics out of the decennial redistricting process.
Voters would ultimately decide the question at the ballot box.
Many of VanValkenburg’s fellow House Democrats opposed the bill, while it garnered strong support from the same Republicans who spent 2019 “calling me a socialist.”
But the delegate who described himself as an “idealistic civics teacher” crusading for “healthy democracy” told the Virginia Mercury in March 2020 that voting for the bill was the right thing to do.
“I believed in this from the beginning,” he said.
So did a lot of Virginia liberals, including U.S. Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, as well as the ACLU of Virginia, the League of Women Voters of Virginia, and other leftist groups.
Voters in November of that year overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment taking political map-drawing out of the General Assembly’s hands and turning it over to the “independent” commission.
More than five years later, Virginia’s ultra-left state government headed by the commonwealth’s new governor, Abigail Spanberger — a radical liberal dressed in moderate clothing — is looking to kill the “fair maps” commission that voters demanded.
‘The Will of the People’
In a move to squeeze out every last drop of political advantage, General Assembly Democrats are attempting to idle the independent commission by taking the unprecedented step of redrawing the state’s congressional map mid-decade. The new lines, recently signed into law by Spanberger, would bolster the Dems’ advantage in 10 of Virginia’s 11 House seats. Voters again are being asked to decide whether to change the state constitution, this time to temporarily turn redistricting power back to the legislature.
Early voting for the April 21 special election begins Friday, even as legal challenges hang over the issue.
VanValkenburg, the “idealistic civics teacher”, has suddenly changed his tune on the map-drawing process, supporting the ballot issue that will undercut the commission he helped create.
“We’re not trying to end the practice of fair maps. We are asking the voters if, in this one limited case, they want to assure that a constitutional norm-busting president can’t rig the entire national election by twisting the arms of a few state legislatures,” VanValkenburg, now a senator serving Virginia’s 16th District, said on the floor in October during hurried debate on the constitutional amendment.
In other words, the party that claims to be the last line of defense for democracy is looking to choke the will of the people in the 2020 election — for political gain. They insist they’re doing so in retaliation of Texas’ mid-decade redistricting effort expected to net Republicans as many as five additional congressional seats. President Donald Trump urged the Lone Star State’s GOP-controlled legislature to do so.
James Abrenio, a Democrat and criminal defense attorney from Fairfax County appointed to the Virginia Redistricting Committee, is backing the ballot issue. Getting Trump, it seems, trumps “good governance” principles.
“Trump, tragically, has proved the most cynical fears of this whole thing: If you don’t have all states willing to get on board, you can have a bad actor come take advantage,” Abrenio told the left-leaning Virginia Independent News. He said the temporary change in the way Virginia draws its congressional map is critical to ensure the U.S. House “reflects the will of the people.”
But what about the “will of the people” who voted in 2020 to change Virginia’s constitution to put the independent commission in control of redistricting?
J. Garren Shipley, communications director for Virginia House Minority Leader Terry Kilgore, told The Daily Signal that “millions of Virginians who voted for nonpartisan map drawing are having their voices ignored by this process.”
“The biggest challenge right now is ensuring that Virginians know that the vote to ‘restore fairness,’ according to the ballot language, is actually a naked power grab,” Shipley added.
‘A Moral Conflict’
The hypocrites in California have already gone down this road.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Golden State’s biggest hypocrite, led a campaign to mothball the California Citizens Redistricting Commission. Like Virginia Democrats, Newsom and crew claimed they needed to put their full fist on the scales of a mid-decade redraw of the state’s congressional districts to fire back at Trump’s Texas “power grab.” But it’s hard not to see that California Dems are trading their high-minded democratic principles for political advantage.
Despite a Politico poll that found nearly two-thirds of California voters supported keeping the “nonpartisan” redistricting commission in place, Democrats ended up approving a “temporary” freeze to ensure the already gerrymandered blue state becomes even bluer.
Again, the most vocal advocates for taking politics out of the process ultimately opted for the Democrat-controlled legislature to handle the map manipulation.
Sara Sadhwani, a former Democrat member of the Redistricting Commission, said Proposition 50, the ballot question in November’s special election to change the state constitution, presented every California voter with “a moral conflict.” But Sadhwani’s conscience was soothed by the fact that partisan redistricting could help Democrats take back control of the House.
“It brings me no joy to see the maps that we passed fairly by the Commission to be tossed aside,” she said in testifying in support of the redistricting plan, as reported by CalMatters. “I do believe this is a necessary step in a much bigger battle to shore up free and fair elections in our nation.”
Apparently so did a strong majority of voters who approved the change. The maps have survived multiple legal challenges, including at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Sadhwani’s greater good political justification sounds a lot like the twisted logic behind “antiracism,” leftist garbage race dogma that asserts, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” California Democrats who have long boasted about their “gold standard” of drawing congressional lines have once again told the world that the only way to save democracy is to burn democracy to the ground.
“These are extraordinary times,” Sadhwani told Politico’s Playbook. “At this moment, I’m not so worried about California’s democracy.” That’s because the college professor likes the people in power. Democrats hold supermajorities in the state legislature and control the executive and judicial branches.
Unrighteous Indignation
Newsom and his Democrat cronies were bleeding the coveted California Redistricting Commission dry well before Prop 50 emerged.
As Independent Voter News reported last year, state lawmakers have cut the commission’s funding. The panel was downsized a couple of years ago, and locked out of the Prop 50 conversation. Commissioner J. Ray Kennedy, told the publication that the legislature has starved the commission of the funding they need to carry out their work.”
“Not only has all of this been schemed up without the commission’s input, without even the courtesy of formal notice to the commission, but the state’s budget constraints on the commission have prevented it from convening until now to discuss our response,” Kennedy said.
California is one of six states that has implemented new congressional maps, including Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Utah. Missouri’s maps, however, face lingering legal challenges.
Indiana could have joined the party with a redistricting plan that might have yielded the red state’s GOP an additional two congressional seats. But Republican state senators in December joined Democrats in rejecting the plan.
Democrats applauded what they viewed as courage from the senators who defied Trump’s midterm redistricting push. They then quickly went back to the business of trying to squeeze out more congressional seats with their own gerrymandering power grab.
“Donald Trump launched this unprecedented effort to gerrymander congressional maps all across the country as part of his scheme to rig the midterm elections,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries hyperbolically told CNN when asked about his party’s strategy after the Indiana vote. “The reality of the situation is that Republicans may have started this redistricting battle. We as Democrats plan to finish it.”
Virginia is among three blue states including Maryland and Washington that have introduced legislation proposing or authorizing new congressional maps, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The threats on the left keep coming. As legal commentator Johnathan Turley wrote last year for The Hill, some of the Democrats’ outrage over the redistricting battle seem like a comedy routine.
“In Massachusetts, Gov. Maura Healey pledged to retaliate by gerrymandering her heavily gerrymandered state,” Turley noted. The problem? It is already so badly gerrymandered that there are no Republican House members in the state — there haven’t been any since the 1990s.”
