It’s hard to be mad at the Democrats in Richmond.
They told us exactly who they were before Election Day, but apparently not enough people believed them.
Five weeks into early voting, the Democrat-controlled General Assembly passed an amendment to the Virginia Constitution to bypass the Virginia Redistricting Commission and allow the Democrats to redraw congressional maps specifically for the 2026 midterm elections.
The move blatantly ignored Virginia’s Constitution, which requires that before an amendment is presented to voters as a referendum, the amendment must pass two separately elected General Assemblies. In other words, there must be an intervening election between the two different General Assemblies that pass the amendment.
When warned the amendment’s illegal passage would face legal challenges, Democrats shrugged their shoulders and dared Republicans to stop them.
Their smug reaction was similar to their sticking by their attorney general nominee, Jay Jones, even after he said Republicans’ children should die in their mother’s arms to persuade them to change their political views.
When Abigail Spanberger was asked during the gubernatorial debate to respond to the Jay Jones revelations, she stood defiant and stone-faced, save for an eerie smirk, refusing to even acknowledge the question or questioner.
The Democrats did not care about optics or decorum before their November victory, and that contempt for the electorate unabashedly continues.
Barely one month into the new Democrat trifecta, Virginians are seeing the consequences of their votes. With head-turning speed, Spanberger has shifted from a self-described “moderate Virginia mom” to a general of far-left radicals.
Virginia’s electorate has historically remained pretty evenly split, shifting back-and-forth between the Northern Virginia (NOVA) urban liberals just outside Washington, D.C., and the Rest of Virginia (ROVA) that leans more conservative.
In 2020, Virginia voters enshrined a bipartisan redistricting commission into the state constitution by an overwhelming 66 percent. The current 6D - 5R congressional map was unanimously approved by the Virginia Supreme Court in December 2021, and received an “A” rating by the nonpartisan Princeton Gerrymandering Project.
Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin defeated former DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe by a 50.6 percent to 48.6 percent margin in 2021, but then the state voted Kamala Harris over President Donald Trump 51.8 percent to 46.1 percent in 2024.
Thanks to a federal employee temper tantrum on behalf of all the government workers living outside D.C., the NOVA liberals handily beat the rest of Virginia, electing D.C.-insider Spanberger 57.58 percent over ROVA officeholder Sears’ 42.22 percent.
The Democrats in Richmond are punishing their political opponents while ensuring they never lose another election.
Defying a Virginia circuit court ruling that their redistricting scheme is unconstitutional, they have proposed a 10-1 congressional map in their favor. The disfigured gerrymander purposefully cancels out the representative voices of nearly everyone in Virginia not living in the D.C. suburbs.
The Democrats smiled as they plowed ahead, just like Abigail Spanberger smiled on that debate stage.
And she smiled again when she signed this bill into law, after it was ruled unconstitutional by a court in her state. So much for the rule of law in Virginia.
Some people say this is a “defining moment” for Abigail Spanberger, asking if she really wants to put her signature to the obviously lawless power grab in Richmond.
But Spanberger plainly relishes solidifying the Democrats’ stranglehold over Virginia elections for years, maybe decades, to come.
It doesn’t matter that Spanberger told Virginians on election night that she would represent all the people, both those who voted for her and those who did not.
Instead, she and the Democrat cartel in Richmond claim that stripping half of Virginians of meaningful congressional representation is justified because Texas redrew its maps at the behest of the Biden DOJ.
That excuse doesn’t hold. Gerrymandering didn’t begin yesterday, and it certainly didn’t begin in Texas. The very word was born in the Democrat haven of Massachusetts, where Governor Elbridge Gerry’s party engineered district lines so distorted they became a national punchline.
And modern Democrats have shown they are willing to take that tradition to extremes—most notably in Illinois, where Democrats are so comfortable with their decades-long practice of squeezing out Republicans that they openly defended their 2021 partisan gerrymander.
Democrats today completely omit from their Texas revenge tale what actually happened: after the Biden DOJ pressed Texas into a redraw, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) escalated the national fight in 2024 by ordering a more partisan redistricting to eliminate Republican seats.
Jeffries is now exporting that national power play into Virginia. The New York Times reveals that Jeffries has been “intimately involved in the talks, with frequent calls to Virginia state legislators” throughout the process, to make sure Virginia helps secure his path to become the next Speaker of the House.
Spanberger served with Jeffries in Congress. Now, she’s his progressive general in Richmond, carrying his marching orders.
Her first bill signature makes it clear what this is really about: raw political power, pursued without regard for Virginia’s constitutional guardrails, all to turn Virginia into another enclave of power-hungry leftists.
On January 13, the Supreme Court of Virginia announced it will allow the ballot measure referendum vote to take place as scheduled on April 21, 2026. If voters don’t wise up to the fraudulent “moderate Democrat” bait-and-switch, they will continue to hand power to politicians who break the rules when it suits them, then dare voters and the courts to stop them.
Thomas Lane is a Virginia resident and sits on the Board of Governors for the Republican National Lawyers Association.
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