The Gerrymander Debacle In Virginia Leaves The Democratic Party With A Dangerous Agenda
by Jonathan Turley via jonathanturley.org,
“Eff around and find out”: That taunt from Hakeem Jeffries celebrating Virgi
# THE TAKE: Virginia's Gerrymandering Theater Misses the Real Plot Let's cut through the performative outrage. Democrats didn't invent partisan mapmaking—they inherited it from Republican architects who perfected the craft. Virginia's redistricting chaos reflects something uglier: *both parties* treating democracy like a zero-sum game. The "dangerous agenda" framing is lazy. The actual danger? A system where drawing lines matters more than policy. When politicians choose voters instead of voters choosing politicians, the agenda becomes irrelevant. Hakeem Jeffries' victory lap deserves skepticism—not because Democrats won, but because celebrating redistricting "wins" normalizes the entire corrupt mechanism. Real reform requires independent commissions with teeth, not partisan scorekeeping. Virginia didn't expose Democratic danger. It exposed our collective democratic bankruptcy.
What the Documents Show
Abigail Spanberger had run as a moderate who explicitly denounced gerrymandering as "detrimental to our democracy and weakens the individual voices that form our electorates." Upon taking office, she immediately called for what analysts considered the nation's most extreme gerrymander. The Virginia Supreme Court's language was unusually blunt, characterizing the state's legal argument as "a story of the tail wagging the dog that has no tail." More significantly, the court found the redistricting effort "wholly unprecedented in Virginia's history." This wasn't a close call or a technical violation—it was a complete departure from established precedent in the commonwealth. Yet mainstream media coverage leading up to the decision relied almost exclusively on liberal legal experts predicting the maps would survive constitutional challenge. The rushed nature of the redistricting effort, designed to circumvent state constitutional protections, received minimal scrutiny from outlets that typically highlight democratic norm-breaking. The political calculation behind the gerrymander reveals a troubling comfort level with institutional manipulation among Democratic leadership.
Follow the Money
In a purple state where crossover votes often determine electoral outcomes, the redistricting push abandoned even the pretense of bipartisanship or good-faith governance. Democratic officials gambled that courts would defer to the legislature and that short-term partisan advantage outweighed long-term credibility. They lost that gamble decisively. The consequences extend beyond gerrymandering mechanics. By pursuing an openly partisan and historically unprecedented map, Virginia Democrats burned critical bridges with conservative and moderate voters in a state that requires coalition-building to govern effectively. As the court decision makes clear, this was not a case of both parties engaging in standard redistricting disputes—the court found the Democratic approach genuinely exceptional in its extremism.
What Else We Know
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries' celebrated the effort with the taunt "Eff around and find out," a phrase that, in retrospect, captured the recklessness of the entire strategy. For ordinary Virginians, this episode demonstrates how easily electoral systems can become tools for eliminating opposition rather than representing diverse populations. When political parties conclude that winning elections through expanded voter bases matters less than engineering outcome certainty, democracy becomes performative. The court's intervention prevented one outcome, but the willingness of Democratic leadership to pursue it signals deeper institutional erosion that voters should find deeply concerning regardless of party affiliation.
Primary Sources
- Source: ZeroHedge
- Category: Unexplained
- Cross-reference independently — don't take our word for it.
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