It was fun while it lasted. Fun? Well … revealing, anyway.
Yesterday, the New York Times reported that Democrats in Virginia would amend the state constitution to force all sitting judges on its state supreme court to retire, after losing a 4-3 decision on another botched attempt to amend the state constitution. David wrote about the even more breathtaking abuse of power this would represent.
It turns out that this was a bridge too far even for Democrats, who have begun to wonder about the backlash coming from its scummy tactics in gerrymandering the state. As one Democrat “operative” told the Virginia Scope this morning, the idea amounted to nothing more than “schizo hopium”:
“Everyone has got to have a strong stomach right now; this is a complete disaster waiting to happen if people are timid,” Subramanyam told the NYT. “We have Republican states ignoring their constitutions and interrupting early voting and ignoring their Supreme Courts all together. We know based on that, Republicans would explore every single option possible to move this forward.”
Several Virginia Democratic operatives immediately pushed back against the idea of drastically changing how the commonwealth operates.
“This is schizo hopium,” one operative told Virginia Scope.
Even worse, it turns out to be unwoke schizo hopium:
Another operative pointed out that removing all seven justices would mean they are firing the first female Black chief justice.
Oopsie! Can’t have that, can we?
This was hardly the only fly in the radical-nihilist ointment. Democrats seem to keep forgetting about the time restrictions for passing amendments to the state constitution, the very flaw that blew up their gerrymandering plans in the first place. They also forgot to check in with one of their own legislative leaders first, as Axios reported within the past hour:
Reality check: All of this requires support from state Democrats that congressional Democrats don’t seem to have.
- Virginia House Majority Leader Scott Surovell told Virginia Scope on Monday that the “drastic measures” aren’t going anywhere.
- And Virginia Elections Commissioner Steven Koski warned in a previous court filing that changes made after Tuesday, May 12, would throw the state’s Aug. 4 primary into chaos, risking ballot errors, voter confusion and election delays.
In other words, there is a lot of schizo in that hopium. This looks like an attempt to steamroll Surovell and other VA Dems by stoking expectations and casting any hesitation as “timidity” rather than sanity. It doesn’t appear to have worked, in large part because there’s no way it can work.
Surovell explained this further in an interview with a crestfallen New Republic:
Yet Surovell insisted in an interview with The New Republic that the plan is unworkable. He cited a May 12 deadline set by the state Department of Elections for having congressional maps entered into the state’s election system. That’s necessary in order to be prepared for the congressional primaries set for August 1, for which early voting starts in mid-June.
That May 12 deadline would not leave enough time to execute the end run, Surovell said. The tactic would involve state legislative votes lowering the retirement age for judges followed by a new hearing of the case and other associated procedural arcana.
In a revelation that will dismay a lot of Democrats, the problem appears to be that the voting system has not been updated recently enough to make faster entry of the new maps possible (it’s currently being updated). If this ends up costing Democrats the House—which is unlikely but not impossible—the recriminations will be severe.
“Because the technology is so old, it takes a lot of time to input new districts into the computers, to ensure that people are assigned the correct ballots and that voting is not completely chaotic in November,” Surovell told me.
As for the NYT story, it claimed that Hakeem Jeffries and Abigail Spanberger were seriously considering the plan, TNR reports that Democrats in the state were serious about it as well. Surovell, however, insisted that he explained all of this in detail to both Jeffries and Spanberger before the NYT report raised expectations of the brute-force strategy. TNR complains that Republicans are more ruthless than Democrats in this fight, but it skips over a very big difference between blue and red states in this fight:
Still, many Democrats will look at this situation and note that Republicans keep finding ways around procedural obstacles, while Democrats keep getting stymied by them. After the U.S. Supreme Court killed the protection against racial gerrymanders, it took Tennessee only a few days to wipe out a Democratic district by carving up the Black population in Memphis.
In Florida, Republicans promptly rushed through a map that eliminated four Democratic districts, having zero qualms about it even though it faces substantial legal challenges. Republicans in other Southern states are expected to quickly follow suit, which could give Republicans a net gain of five seats—or possibly six or seven—in the redistricting wars.
There are a lot of these kinds of complaints on social media too, claiming that Texas, Florida, and Tennessee made these changes “without a vote.” That’s not true at all; state legislatures voted on these redistricting plans in all three states, and other red states will do the same. The real difference in this fight is that blue states passed amendments to state constitutions that passed authority for redistricting from legislatures to so-called “independent” commissions to lock in previous gerrymanders. Red states kept redistricting authority where it belongs, in state legislatures, while Gavin Newsom and Abigail Spanberger had to reverse those previous amendments via referendum first before their legislatures could act.
Republicans in red states have no obstacles for “finding ways around.” Democrats in blue states are having to find ways around obstacles of their own devising. Rather than admit that, Jeffries and his band of extremists keep doubling down on their attacks on the judiciary. It’s absurd and dangerous in the long run, but perhaps amusing in this one instance where “schizo hopium” met reality more quickly than expected.
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