Elle Purnell writes for the Federalist about Virginia Democrats’ attempt to salvage their congressional gerrymander.
Jay Jones, the Virginia attorney general who fantasized about executing a Republican colleague and wished death on his children, has not developed a reputation for thoughtful reflection. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that, in his typographically challenged frenzy to salvage Virginia Democrats’ gerrymandering efforts, he has accidentally made a case to the U.S. Supreme Court against the months-long “election season” that his fellow Democrats prize. The only thing that could make the cosmic irony sweeter would be the Supreme Court taking Jones up on his request to interpret the Constitution as mandating a single Election Day.
The Virginia Constitution requires constitutional referendums, like the one Democrats rammed through changing the makeup of the state’s congressional representation from six Democrats and five Republicans to 10-1, to be passed twice by the legislature, with an election between passages. Unfortunately for Democrats, when they passed the referendum the first time, voters were already more than a month into the early voting period for the election that was constitutionally required to take place after the referendum’s first passage. The Virginia Supreme Court struck the referendum down on these grounds last week.
Instead of accepting the highest Virginia court’s interpretation of Virginia law, Jones has placed himself in the awkward position of arguing that Virginia’s 45-day election actually takes place on a single day. In an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Jones argues that federal law “expressly fixes a single day for the ‘election’ of Representatives and Delegates to Congress.”
The Virginia Constitution, Jones insists, “unmistakably indicates that, as a matter of ordinary English usage, the ‘general election’ takes place in ‘November,’ not over a three-month period beginning in September.” Election integrity advocates who have long complained about Democrats’ extension of Election Day into a months-long process via early and mail-in voting could hardly have said it better.
Even Vox, hardly a wellspring of serious constitutional analysis, cautioned that Jones was shooting Democrat interests in the foot by asking the Supreme Court to weigh in on that claim.
