"THE BLUE WAVE IS REALLY COMING BACK": HOW THE SUPREME COURT JUST FLIPPED THE SCRIPT IN VIRGINIA
Arguably, Virginia’s 66th District is the precise epicenter of the nation’s political wars—and the Supreme Court, with the help of two of its most conservative judges, just tilted it toward the Democrats. In a somewhat unexpected decision, the Court dismissed the challenge to a lower court ruling in which the judges said 11 districts in Virginia were racially gerrymandered. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch sided with the liberal wing of the Court—Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan—in arguing that Republicans in the Virginia House of Delegates didn’t have the legal standing to challenge the decision of the Eastern U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Virginia’s 66th was redrawn. Its representative is Republican Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates Kirk Cox, who has represented the district for 29 years. Cox led the House Republican effort to overturn the lower court’s decision, at the cost of millions of dollars to Virginian taxpayers. In a January interview with the Washington Post, Cox slammed the new map as “legally indefensible” and designed to “target senior Republicans” like himself. In the wake of the court’s decision, the Republican is expected to face his first tough race in decades in his redrawn district, which is expected to be a full 32 percentage points more favorable to Democrats this November.
By pure accident, Cox drew the national spotlight earlier this year when Virginia’s top three political officials, Democrats, were besieged by scandal. Within the span of five days, Governor Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring both admitted to wearing blackface and a college professor accused Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax of sexual assault. (Fairfax denied the allegations.) Had all three resigned, the next in line to the governor’s mansion would have been Cox, who only ascended to his leadership position thanks to a literal luck of the draw. The scandals had given the Trump campaign ambitions to flip the state in 2020—but the Supreme Court decision once again puts Republicans on the defensive.
he person who is happiest about the verdict is Cox’s challenger, Sheila Bynum-Coleman. “With this particular district, it’s like a circle around my community. With the previous district, it was like over the river through the woods. It definitely cut out Democratic voters. The people who live down the street from me were not able to vote for me. And now I go to the grocery store or the corner store and people are excited to know that they can,” she told me. “When you divide communities, you disenfranchise people.”
Virginia Democrats will now face a much more favorable map this November and hope to build on the legislative gains they made in the Commonwealth in 2017 and 2018. “We’ve seen that Virginia is a big indicator of national trends. We’re the only southern state that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Then in 2017, it was really the start of the blue wave, right? Our 15-seat pickup was the biggest pickup in over a hundred years in Virginia. The Democratic Party lost the majority in Virginia back in 1999 so it’s been a really long time serving in the minority in the house of delegates here,” Kathryn Gilley, the communications director for the Virginia House Democrats, told me. “Now we’re seeing the blue wave is really coming back to Virginia and we’re here to finally flip the house. Which is going to be momentous to have a Democratic majority for the first time in 20 years.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/06/supreme-court-gerrymandering-virginia-kirk-cox-sheila-bynum-coleman?utm_medium=social&utm_brand=vf&mbid=social_twitter&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=twitter&verso=true
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Thomas AND Gorsuch sided with the left
I feel...
