Virginia Supreme Court Overturns Democrats’ Redistricting Power Grab

The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday struck down the results of a redistricting referendum narrowly approved by voters in a special election last month.

Leading pro-life groups opposed the Democrat power grab because it would eliminate pro-life votes in Congress.

The state’s high court ruled that Democratic lawmakers violated constitutional procedural rules when they rushed a measure onto the ballot aimed at enabling mid-decade congressional redistricting.

REACH PRO-LIFE PEOPLE WORLDWIDE! Advertise with LifeNews to reach hundreds of thousands of pro-life readers every week. Contact us today.

The decision blocks Democrats from implementing new congressional maps that would have shifted Virginia’s U.S. House delegation from its current 6-5 pro-abortion Democratic advantage to a 10-1 supermajority favoring pro-abortion Democrats.

The proposed maps would have spread slivers of heavily Democratic Northern Virginia across the state, leaving only one safely Republican district in the southwestern part.

Republicans, who sued to stop the effort, had called the redistricting push “extreme, illegal and hyperpartisan.”

Voters approved the referendum 51% to 48% on April 21. The special election cost the state $5.2 million.

The court found that the Democratic-controlled General Assembly failed to follow the Virginia Constitution’s requirements for placing a constitutional amendment on the ballot, which generally requires passage in two legislative sessions separated by an intervening election. Instead, lawmakers used an accelerated special session.

Virginia Tech professor Cayce Myers said: “The Constitution prescribes a way by which a ballot referendum can occur. Generally speaking, the ballot referendum has to pass through the legislature, there has to be an intervening election, and then there’s another passing of the vote, and then it goes on the ballot. That process, by just looking at it from a constitutional perspective, looks like a long process. This process was very fast because there was a special session.”

Pro-life advocates and Republicans had strongly opposed the redistricting effort, warning it was a partisan power grab designed to entrench pro-abortion majorities in Virginia’s congressional delegation.

With the referendum overturned, Virginia will keep its existing congressional maps for the November elections and beyond. Legal experts expect additional lawsuits over the state’s redistricting process.