Roughly an hour before my long scheduled conversation with Andrew Weissmann, Virginia’s highest court handed down a major ruling voiding redistricted maps approved by voters in a recent referendum.
That bombshell gave us much to discuss at the end of a heavy news week. Here’s what you should know about the topics for our hour-long conversation:
Virginia’s top court overrules the People
The 4-3 ruling by the Supreme Court of Virginia scrapped redistricted maps expected to hand Democrats four additional seats in the midterm elections, finding the April 21 referendum illegally took place after early voting had begun.
“In this case, the Commonwealth submitted a proposed constitutional amendment to Virginia voters in an unprecedented manner that violated the intervening-election requirement in Article XII, Section 1 of the Constitution of Virginia,” the majority opinion said. “This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void.”
Despite being nominally nonpartisan, Virginia’s Supreme Court justices are appointed by legislatures under partisan control. The ruling is perceived to have broken down along that ideological divide.
The dissenting justices noted that the majority’s ruling broadened the definition of “election” in Virginia’s constitution to achieve its result.
This decision didn’t come in a vacuum
Since Donald Trump pushed Texas Republicans to gerrymander maps before the midterms, both parties have been engaged in a nationwide redistricting arms race.
As the Democratic Party loses its competitive edge in Virginia, GOP-controlled legislatures across the American South have been busily erasing majority-Black districts in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, which gutted the vestiges of the Voting Rights Act. On Thursday, the Tennessee legislature carved Memphis into numerous White-majority districts, sparking protests in the Capitol where activists shouted “No Jim Crow!”
Emboldened by the Calais decision, GOP-controlled governments in Florida, Louisiana, and Alabama immediately redrew maps, which already have come under legal challenge.
Throughout the conversation, Andrew Weissmann and I discuss Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent, which you can read along with the majority opinion here.
Behind the Fulton County ruling
Earlier this week, U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee refused to order the return of the 2020 presidential election ballots that the FBI seized from Fulton County in January.
Significantly, Boulee never wrote anywhere in his 68-page ruling that the search warrant justifying that raid was supported by probable cause. In fact, Boulee, a Trump appointee, acknowledged that the FBI’s application was “far from perfect” and at times, “troubling” and “problematic.”
The judge found that Fulton County wouldn’t be entitled to the return of the evidence even if he found the warrant to be “invalid” because the legal standard was more exacting.
It’s unclear whether Fulton County intends to appeal the ruling to the 11th Circuit, where the relevant case law is another famous case. That’s where Trump tried and failed to keep the FBI from investigating evidence seized from Mar-a-Lago.
Already, the Trump Justice Department is seizing upon Boulee’s ruling as evidence to discredit the 2020 presidential election results, which have been verified through audits, recounts and lawsuits.
The deep-dive conversation separates the fact from the fiction.
Read Boulee’s order here.
Sen. Kelly on the cusp of victory
This week, the D.C. Circuit heard oral arguments in an appeal of a ruling blocking Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from punishing Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) for his video telling members of the military and intelligence community that they can refuse “illegal orders.”
A federal grand jury already refused to indict Kelly in connection with the video, and a lower court judge blocked Hegseth’s administrative action. Hegseth censured Kelly and initiated proceedings to reduce his retirement rank.
Legal experts broadly agree that the D.C. Circuit seems poised to hand Kelly another victory, in rare good news for the First Amendment.
Happy Friday!
