transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] But 10 to 1 is really hard to sell to the voters, that you should have 90% of the seats in a state you wouldn't get 53% of the vote in.

Speaker 2:
[00:06] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[00:06] And it's just hard to draw, and hard to draw and hard to sell to people, and to their credit, they got this past.

Speaker 3:
[00:24] Welcome to Law and Chaos, where Republicans started a war and Virginia finished it. Also, Glenn Beck is about to be sued into oblivion. We've got a lot to cover, so let's get after it. Happy Friday, Cast Monkeys. I'm Liz Dye, and with me as always is Andrew Torrez. Andrew, how are you?

Speaker 2:
[00:45] I'm good, Liz. How are you? You have been everywhere this week. You wanna talk about some of your appearances?

Speaker 3:
[00:52] Oh, gosh, I don't know. I guess I did an appearance with Adam Klassfeld, which I think is gonna air on Legal AF, and I was on the Michael Signorelle show earlier today talking about the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has been indicted. We're gonna talk about it ourselves, but in the subscriber bonus. I did a long piece on it for public notice, so if you wanna read about it, you could certainly go there. And what do you got planned for this weekend?

Speaker 2:
[01:16] I am not certain yet, but I think we are getting out of that funk of it dropping down to 40 degrees here in Baltimore. Hopefully, it'll be warm again, and I can get outside.

Speaker 3:
[01:27] And record a subscriber bonus episode, question, hint.

Speaker 2:
[01:31] Absolutely, 100%. What is coming is a subscriber bonus on poker and the laws in Texas, and it's gonna be a lot of fun.

Speaker 3:
[01:44] Okay, well, I am looking forward to that. I know our listeners are as well. Our main story today involves the Virginia special election where voters approved a constitutional amendment, which will allow the legislature to adopt a new map where Democrats can flip as many as four house seats. When we try to take back now, I don't know, maybe both houses of Congress in the November midterms, you sat down on Tuesday and discussed it with our buddy, Joe. He's not really my buddy. He's my child.

Speaker 2:
[02:12] He's my buddy, though.

Speaker 3:
[02:13] He's definitely your buddy. And as we said in the subscriber bonus, we're going to go deep on the SPLC indictment by Todd Blanch and Kash Patel for using donor money to make racism where none existed. I believe that is their theory of the case.

Speaker 2:
[02:31] It's something.

Speaker 3:
[02:32] Okay. First up though, we got docket alerts. Okay. Let's start with the sewing is fun, reaping is not so much kind of story, courtesy of one Glenn Beck.

Speaker 2:
[02:44] I mean, there's a guy who should never have a fun day for the rest of his life.

Speaker 3:
[02:48] Well, he's got a few unpleasant ones coming up for sure. Beck's company, The Blaze, is being sued by Shauni Kerkhoff. She is a former Capitol cop whom Blaze, The Blaze falsely accused of being the DNC pipe bomber. Kirkie defended the Capitol on January 6th, and she testified against multiple attackers in court. So it's not totally surprising that they came after her, but the way that they did it is incredibly ghoulish. So the story, published in November by reporters Stephen Baker and Joseph Hanneman, claimed to have done gait analysis, that is, of her walk, of Kerkhoff. She's a former college soccer player, and they claim to have found with 94% accuracy that she was the person in that grainy footage of the suspect planting the bombs on January 5th.

Speaker 2:
[03:37] Needless to say, it was not Kerkhoff who planted the bombs on January 5th. Of course, it wasn't. Gate analysis is kind of like phrenology, but less accurate. I will say, though, that this paints the FBI in an absolutely terrible light. Like, obviously, these articles in The Blaze pinned a target on her back for the media and the January 6th obsessives who have spent the past six years trying to retcon this into an FBI operation to deflect from their own guilt in trying to orchestrate a coup of the US government, right? They say it was Antifa agitators or secret FBI informants planted in the crowd. I mean, anything but what it was, a coup plot by the president and his violent supporters. So I guess it's not at all surprising that these sickos still insist that she did it even after the real culprit has been arrested. But it's pretty shocking that the Justice Department treated this like a real thing based on nothing more than internet chatter and an article on The Blaze talking about gait analysis.

Speaker 3:
[04:40] Oh my god. The FBI agents with bomb-sniffing dogs ransacked this woman's apartment. They put her on leave from her job at the CIA. They strapped her to a polygraph for hours. Eventually, Kerkhoff went through her phone and figured out that she and her boyfriend had been taking video of their dog being adorable in his sleep at the times the bombs were being planted. So she was exonerated and cleared to return to duty. But it's really kind of shocking how far the Justice Department went to investigate her based on nothing more than this idiotic story about gait analysis.

Speaker 2:
[05:13] A story, by the way, which The Blaze refused to back down from for months.

Speaker 3:
[05:18] Well, I expect that they're going to live to regret that. Perhaps not as much as Alex Jones regrets calling the Sandy Hooks parents crisis actors, but still a lot. She has filed a monster of a defamation suit and she's represented by Clare Locke, one of the most aggressive First Amendment litigation shops in the country.

Speaker 2:
[05:36] Yeah, and by aggressive, we mean like old school roughing the passer. And Clare Locke is who you hire when you want to gore the other side. Like, these are not nice guy. We actually talked about Clare Locke when we interviewed David Enrich about his book, Murder the Truth. Clare Locke's long term goal is to overturn the New York Times v. Sullivan actual malice standard to make it easier for them as a law firm to file defamation suits on behalf of public figures. They have represented Project Veritas and Sarah Palin, as well as, to be fair, a lot of perfectly decent people. They are going to make this extremely unpleasant for The Blaze and those goobers who wrote the articles.

Speaker 3:
[06:16] I mean, I'm not mad about it. Like, if anybody deserves it, definitely Glenn Beck. But you know what I am mad about? I am mad about Carter Page.

Speaker 2:
[06:26] Okay. Blast from the past. Wasn't Carter Page the dimwit who worked for the Trump campaign in 2016 and wound up in the middle of the Russia investigation?

Speaker 3:
[06:36] That's him. It's funny, he had been previously like Russian spies had tried to recruit him and decided he was like too stupid to be any use to them.

Speaker 2:
[06:45] I think I saw that Netflix documentary.

Speaker 3:
[06:48] So there was, but okay, Carter Page, his place in history is that he was the one allegation of impropriety in the Russian investigation that was actually substantiated. The government fudged the details of his background to get a FISA warrant on him. That has been out there and acknowledged for years. But no court has ever given this guy any money for it despite he's filed a whole pile of goofy ass lawsuits. But now the Trump administration has just decided to pay him $1.25 million of your money, you being the American taxpayer, in a lawsuit which has already been tossed out by a Trump appointee at the district court in DC, tossed out by the DC circuit. It was, he filed a petition for cert, and they at the Supreme Court informed the Supreme Court that actually they're just going to give him cash.

Speaker 2:
[07:38] Yeah, this is the same playboy. I mean, they just paid Mike Flynn the same amount, $1.25 million. I think clearly this is to soften us up for the hundreds of millions of dollars that they're going to give to Donald Trump for his bullshit lawsuit. I mean, they're trying to normalize this process.

Speaker 3:
[07:57] It is not normal. This is theft. Okay, let's talk about The Fifth Circuit. You wrote a really interesting piece, breaking down a Fifth Circuit decision on prayer in schools. Well, they don't think it's prayer in schools. They think it's history. It's historical posters in schools, every school classroom in the entire state of Texas and Louisiana and Mississippi.

Speaker 2:
[08:19] Yeah, on our blog yesterday, I wrote about The Fifth Circuit's decision. This was nine to eight. It was very, very narrow. It was an en banc decision of the full Fifth Circuit, and it reversed a lower court injunction and allows those states that you mentioned, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, that are in The Fifth Circuit, to pass legislation forcing public schools to post the Ten Commandments. Well, actually, it's the 11th Commandment.

Speaker 3:
[08:45] I know this amuses you so much about the structure of these commandments. You and I tracked a companion lawsuit in Louisiana. That case is called Rope B. Brumley. Texas has a similar but actually worse law. In Louisiana, there was at least a fig leaf that they were posting the Ten Commandments alongside other historical legal documents. Texas's law just says that each school can post the Ten Commandments and only the Ten Commandments with no explicit language or any other context in these huge oversized posters donated by local Protestant churches with zero text, zero context, whatever.

Speaker 2:
[09:21] Yeah, and so all of that is bad and I'm real mad about it and it is about as far removed from the original intent of the framers of the Constitution as you could possibly imagine. Like endorsing a specifically sectarian view of religion is like the one thing that the writings of the framers made clear they thought was inappropriate. But I also want to talk about what this decision means in terms of jurisprudence.

Speaker 3:
[09:47] Yes, so the context is that there is a 1980 Supreme Court case called Stone v. Graham that involved a functionally identical law, posters, public school, donated by churches, Ten Commandments. Stone is still good law. That case has not been overruled. But because Stone relies on a case called Lemon v. Kurtzman, which is one of these foundational separation of church and state cases, and Lemon has functionally been overruled, the Supreme Court is broken. And so their theory is that because Lemon has been functionally overruled, and Stone relied on Lemon for its holding, the holding of Stone that you cannot have these displays of the Ten Commandments in public schools, that holding no longer exists. Stone is implicitly overruled as well, and so they were free not to follow it.

Speaker 2:
[10:40] And that is, to put it mildly, crazy, right? There are dozens, there are almost 60 cases at the Supreme Court alone that cite Lemon v. Kurtzman, and this throws potentially all of them into chaos. And in fact, this question has come up before, and the Supreme Court has said, this is a 1989 case called Rodriguez v. Shearson American Express. Here's what the Supreme Court said. If a precedent of this court has direct application in a case, yet appears to rest on reasons rejected in some other line of our decisions, the Court of Appeals should follow the case which directly controls, leaving to us, leaving to the Supreme Court, the prerogative of overruling its own decisions. And the Fifth Circuit just looked at that and was like, nah, we'll take that prerogative for ourselves. And at any other point in history, you think that the Supreme Court would immediately smack them down? Because even if the Supreme Court doesn't think stone is good law anymore, like it's up to them to say that. And in fact, that's exactly what the Supreme Court did in the Rodriguez case. It's also the Fifth Circuit, and they said, we think you've, the precedent that you think no longer applies does in fact no longer apply, but we're the ones who get to say that, not you.

Speaker 3:
[11:53] Yeah, I mean, the only pushback I would have, well, actually I have two things. The only pushback that I would have with regard to that is that this Supreme Court has been very techy about its shadow docket orders. And in fact, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh have yelled at lower court judges for failing to treat these shadow docket orders, particularly in the impoundment cases, the ones where Congress appropriates money and allocates it, and the Trump administration says, screw that, we're not going to spend it as instructed, basically stealing Congress's power of the purse. So what you've seen is the Supreme Court say, no, the Trump administration doesn't have to spend it, and then kind of yell at lower court judges for saying, why haven't you treated our shadow docket rulings as presidential? Shadow docket rulings are explicitly non-presidential, but it's kind of of a piece with them saying, why aren't you reading our minds and doing what we would do, as opposed to being really protective of their own prerogative to overrule? But I do want to say one more thing, which is that you said that this ruling throws many, many, 50, I think, cases which rely on Lemon into question. It only throws them into question, if at all, in the Fifth Circuit, right? Because it's the Fifth Circuit only, it's not the rest of the country. And I mean, most of the rest of the country thinks that the Fifth Circuit is bonkety bonkers. And so the rest of the circuits in the other 12 circuits, no, no, that's not how it goes. But it's bad enough that it's in the Fifth Circuit, because the Fifth Circuit is where the Trump administration likes to break a lot of laws, because they know that they're going to have the best shot.

Speaker 2:
[13:30] Yeah, I agree. Okay, we have one more docket alert, and it's a nice one. At least it won't make you want to throw things like the last segment. This is out of a federal court in Illinois where Judge Jorge Alonso ruled that the Trump administration violated the First Amendment when it leaned on social media platforms to remove apps and groups that monitored ICE and CBP in their neighborhoods. Judge Alonso issued a preliminary injunction finding that it was coercive for then Attorney General, I'm sorry, can't remember his keys, that it was coercive for Pam Bondi and Christy Noem to demand that the sites take that stuff down.

Speaker 3:
[14:07] Yeah, I mean, I'm not gonna throw anything, but this is some amazing hypocrisy. Remember, the entire Republican conservative project is to complain that they're being canceled, that there's government censorship, and the Biden administration was terrible because it pointed out election and COVID misinformation, which violated the social media platforms' own terms of service and requested it took it down. Now, okay, yes, there was a little bit of jawboning, and if you remember the word jawboning, you probably remember it because we talked on this show about the jawboning cases. They went to the Supreme Court. They were mostly COVID deniers, including RFK, complaining, suing, claiming that the social media sites had been co-opted, become agents of the federal government when they tossed these COVID deniers and censored their speech. They said it violated the First Amendment. Now, obviously, websites cannot violate the First Amendment because websites are not the government, but these plaintiffs had a handy dandy theory, and their theory was that Congress, specifically then-Congressman, now Senator Adam Schiff, threatened to revoke or, you know, null, reverse Section 230 immunity from the platforms, and this threat was so coercive that it effectively transformed these social media platforms into government agents who did terrible things to whatever.

Speaker 2:
[15:35] Yeah, a lot there. So, okay, Section 230, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, is the law, the so-called 16 words that created the Internet. It is the law that shields platforms from liability for user-generated content. So, Law and Chaos is not liable if you defame someone in our comments section. Now, not that you should. You should not. Don't defame anyone. But if you do, that's on you, not us. And while we're doing this little reality check, Donald Trump himself has repeatedly demanded the repeal of Section 230. In fact, in his first term, Trump vetoed the Defense Spending Bill in 2020, because it did not contain a repeal of Section 230 immunity, and the Republican Congress actually had to override his veto. Anyway, their theory of government censorship was ridiculous in those cases. But now, they've manufactured a scenario where the Trump administration has done exactly what they falsely accused the Biden administration of doing, right? Bondi went on Fox and bragged how she'd ordered Facebook and Apple to take the apps down, and they complied, right? And Kristi Noem said that she was looking at prosecuting anyone who doxed federal agents.

Speaker 3:
[16:47] Doxing agents is completely legal, by the way. I would not put someone's home address online, but I would say the name of an agent who did something wrong online, an official in the government, that's not doxing, right?

Speaker 2:
[17:00] Yeah, I mean, particularly when they're going around in masks and unmarked vans. Right.

Speaker 3:
[17:06] So bottom line, the court said that this pressure from the attorney general, then attorney general, and then Homeland Security Secretary, on these platforms and websites violated the First Amendment rights of the users and the app creators who wanted to alert their neighbors about the presence of ICE agents. And look, that's tacitly acknowledging that the websites were functioning as agents of the government, right? I mean, that's not something that Judge Alonzo says in his order, but that's the basis of it. So in those cases, in the jaw-boning cases, which were reversed at the Supreme Court for basically standing, here, the trial judge actually hasn't put out the order specifying exactly what he's going to do. They're still hammering out the terms of the injunction, but basically he's going to stop DHS and the attorney general from issuing these threats to social media platforms to take down information about ICE, which seems appropriate to me. So I'm mad that it happened, but I'm not throwing anything.

Speaker 2:
[18:11] I agree. And to be clear, I think there's a line that we can draw for regardless of which party is in office. What I objected to in the so-called jaw-boning cases where representatives of the Biden administration clicking the report button and sending to Facebook, hey, this is misinformation. But when it crosses the line, when it is no longer reporting, this is against your terms of service, but saying, this is how we're going to retaliate against you if you do not comply. Like, yeah, that goes from suggestion to coercion.

Speaker 3:
[18:43] Okay, that is going to do it for Docket Alerts. If you are a subscriber at any level on our sub stack at lawnchaospod.com or at patreon.com/lawnchaospod, we have a subscriber bonus for you on the Trump administration's criminal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center for everyone else. We'll take a quick ad break and come back with our main story on Virginia's redistricting. And we're back. On Tuesday, voters in Virginia approved a constitutional amendment to redraw the state's 11 congressional seats. So the new map will shift Virginia from six Democrats and five Republicans to probably 10 Democrats and one Republican. Republicans started it, and Virginia finished it. Andrew, you have an interview with our redistricting expert and my wonderful child, Joe Dye. But before we get there, let's talk about what's in the law specifically. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[19:49] So the US Constitution requires the federal government to conduct a census every 10 years. The reason for that is apportionment. If people move from, say, New York to Florida, but each state keeps the same number of seats in the US House of Representatives, you can see how quickly that would get out of whack. So every 10 years, we do a census and we make sure that the congressional districts are as balanced as possible. Asterisk, I'm not getting into the mathematical weeds today, but that's the idea, right? Every 10 years, if a state gains or loses congressional seats, it has to redraw its congressional map to add or subtract the seats, right? And before Republicans completely broke representative government, that's when states redrew their maps. Virginia's Constitution enshrines that into law. It's Article II, Section 6. It says, the Commonwealth of Virginia shall be reapportioned into electoral districts every 10 years. And it further specifies that the agency doing that reapportionment, the districts will be drawn by a bipartisan independent commission. Now, 2025, after Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the governorship and Democrats won supermajorities in both houses, the Virginia State Legislature convened a special session to propose a ballot initiative to amend the Constitution. And that proposed amendment, that now law, amends Article II, Section 6. And it adds in this exception. It says, except that the General Assembly, the legislature, shall be authorized to modify one or more congressional districts in the event that any other state redraws its maps between 2025 and 2030.

Speaker 3:
[21:21] And that provision has already been triggered because the Texas legislature redrew its maps last summer at the insistence of one Donald J. Trump, who demanded that they add three to five Republican seats to shore up his declining fortunes in the midterms, let's say. So this amendment, like the constitutional amendment in California, was explicitly designed to retaliate or counter, depending on your perspective, this move by Texas to rig the odds in their own favor. The amendment's primary sponsor was Virginia State Senator Louise Lucas, who is such a badass. She tweeted it, said, Cruz, you all started it, and we fucking finished it. And she also said, remember when Republicans drew Virginia's congressional map, so black people were packed into one district and said, we should be grateful they gave our community this district, now they can have one district and see how much they like.

Speaker 2:
[22:16] I love her. And look, I think that also sets the stage for our interview, which on one level, this is a big ask for Virginia voters, right? Virginia is a blue state, but it went for Kamala Harris by less than six points in 2024. It's not California, it's not New York, it's not even Maryland. And Virginia Democrats delivered. And so with that in mind, let's get to my interview with Joe. And we're pleased to welcome back to the show our elections law expert, our map redistricting expert, founder of the Joe Dye Group. Welcome back to the show, Joe Dye.

Speaker 3:
[22:55] Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2:
[22:56] Thanks for coming back. Well, we are chatting after the polls have closed in Virginia in their special election. And what we were watching was the outcome of the proposed constitutional amendment. That constitutional amendment allows Virginia to redistrict its congressional districts. And it looks like that's going to pass by about a 3% margin, over 3 million votes cast. Looks like the margin is going to be, again, about 3%, about 100,000 votes in favor of yes. So the constitutional amendment is going to pass, and Virginia is going to redraw its congressional districts. We're going to talk about the text of the amendment and what that means. But first, Joe, just give us your thoughts on the politics of this situation. I mean, this looked like, from my uninformed perspective, that the early voting seemed very, very strong for the yes position, and then there were a lot of battles to kind of close the gap. But why don't you talk some numbers? Tell me your thoughts from a political outcome perspective.

Speaker 1:
[24:08] Yeah, so we're recording this basically right after the amendment passed, so we don't have complete numbers, so just kind of disclosure on that. But at the moment, like you said, yes is winning by 3 percent statewide. That's kind of not where I think you want to be if you're a Democrat, like if it was a Democrat versus Republican race, Dems win by three in Virginia, you're like, oh boy, this is probably not very good. But at the same time, for this amendment, I think you got to feel okay if you're a Democrat. I mean, at the end of the day, you won. That's really all you had to do. Just kind of looking at the map, cursory glance around the map. The rural areas of Virginia kind of behaved as if Virginia was a 50-50 state tonight. You got, yes, got insane margins of Republican voters in rural Virginia. But it just didn't matter because Northern Virginia and Richmond and Virginia Beach came in pretty strong for Dems, kind of behaving like some, like it was 2024, maybe it was 2025 in the attorney general's race, and that carried, yes, over the finish line. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[25:18] It looks more polarized on both ends to me. I'm curious your thoughts about that. So as I scroll through these Southwestern, rural panhandle counties in Virginia, I see districts that Donald Trump won by 60 plus points, going for no by 70 plus points, right? Like an even stronger margin. But as you point out, when I look at the Northern Virginia counties, really the bluest part of Virginia, Prince William, Loudoun County, and Fairfax County, right? Fairfax County was a Kamala Harris plus 35 in 2024. And again, with about 5% of the vote out, but with substantial amounts in, it's yes plus 40, right? Same thing in Loudoun County. Went to Harris by plus 16. And it looks like this is a 21, 22 point margin for yes. So it looks like as maybe with a lot of places in the country that Democrats are more Democratic and Republicans are more Republican.

Speaker 1:
[26:23] Yeah, I think you can kind of still see the effects of the Doge Cuts in Northern Virginia. The place where yes was strongest was Nova. It was still pretty strong in Richmond and then a little less strong in Virginia Beach, but still strong enough. But you look at Nova in terms of running ahead of Kamala Harris and Fairfax, Loudoun, Arlington, Prince William County, County, et cetera. All are basically at or exceeding Kamala Harris' margin in Virginia, which as a Democrat, if you're exceeding your margins in Virginia, you're going to win.

Speaker 2:
[26:56] Yeah. Let me make sure.

Speaker 1:
[26:59] Sorry. On the other end of the spectrum, I don't know that the Republicans ran an awful campaign trying to defeat this. I think the RNC waited too long to put money in, to be honest, if I'm following them, which some friends in my backyard might disagree with, but that's neither here nor there. Really, really amazing turnout in Southwest Virginia and some of the areas that would be impacted by it, but it just didn't matter. There just are fewer people in rural Southwest Virginia than there are in Nova.

Speaker 2:
[27:26] Yeah. Let me make sure that I understand your point about the Northern Virginia counties. When you say the Doge hangover, lots of people who work in Washington, DC live in Northern Virginia, live in Arlington, Fairfax, those areas, and I think the implication that you're going for, I just want to make sure that I'm understanding you correctly, is this is a nationalized race. This is not about what's best for Virginia. This is about explicitly combating Republican efforts to gerrymander in other states and try and hold the house, despite the fact that their policies are drastically unpopular nationwide. So I think the implication was, it's easier to run a nationalized race in Northern Virginia, but those folks are paying attention to federal issues and the makeup of Congress. Is that what you're saying?

Speaker 1:
[28:19] Yeah. I also just think the jobs that were lost and the economic impact from all of the Doge Cuts and all the federal employment loss in the past year and a half, really, you can still see the impact of that in Northern Virginia.

Speaker 2:
[28:33] That they're angrier and they're more democratic now.

Speaker 1:
[28:35] Correct. And exactly right. As opposed to the rest of the state where, you know, I understand the point of if you're someone in, you know, if you're someone in South, you know, West Virginia saying, I don't want to be represented by someone in Arlington or someone in Fairfax County, too bad you're going to be. But I understand the point. I understand the politics on both sides. But at the end of the day, Nova really powered yes through here.

Speaker 2:
[29:04] Well, and I want to jump in on that. You know, you and I talk about this every time we talk about maps. I hate gerrymandering. I hate that we have to do this. I think that it is ridiculous that we are taking a state that is, you know, five to ten points Democratic. That, you know, it's a solidly blue state, but we're going to chop it up and turn it into ten, you know, ten to one Democratic advantage. That's ridiculous. It shouldn't be that way. Republicans ought to have congressional voice in Virginia, but, you know, Democrats ought to have a congressional voice in Wisconsin and North Carolina. Like, you know, we didn't start this fight, and, you know, I'm not going to unilaterally disarm, but I get it if you're talking about, in an ideal world, what things ought to look like. So let's actually talk about the referendum, because this is not like, well, you tell me. To me, this is different than some of the other ballot initiatives that we've seen. What it does is amends the Virginia Constitution. The Virginia Constitution, Article 2, Section 6, says that the Commonwealth of Virginia shall be reapportioned into electoral districts in accordance with this section in the year 2021 and every 10 years thereafter, right? So it kind of tracks the US Constitution. This proposed amendment adds in this clause, says, except that the General Assembly shall be authorized to modify one or more congressional districts at any point following the adoption of a decennial reappointment, but prior to the next census, in the event that any state in the United States of America conducts a redistricting of such states congressional districts at any point following that. So in other words, the Virginia Constitution has as its baseline, we do a national census every 10 years. We have to redraw our congressional districts every 10 years, and we're going to do that. And we're going to use a bipartisan redistricting commission to draw Virginia's congressional districts. And this says, except if other states cheat, we're going to allow the General Assembly to redistrict off cycle, not every 10 years. So number one, that's how you read the amendment as well?

Speaker 1:
[31:20] Yeah, the only sort of caveat or maybe extra point I'll add to that is redistricting is just going to kind of happen. Like lawsuits over redistricting are just going to happen. It's just how this stuff works. Even if the VRA, even probably if slash when the VRA is no longer a thing, maybe tomorrow, which would be a nice emergency episode that we have to record, if slash when the VRA isn't a thing, there's still going to be state partisan gerrymandering claims, think Wisconsin, think Michigan. And so it really just gives them license to have mid-decade redistrict, which they weren't allowed to do before going forward.

Speaker 2:
[31:56] Right. So now let's talk about the practical implications of that. Because what the constitutional amendment says is it's triggered if another state engages in off-decennial, right, in between the census redistricting. But that's already been triggered, right? Lots of other states have redistricted. And then it says the General Assembly shall be authorized to modify one or more congressional districts. But in fact, the General Assembly has already drawn a map.

Speaker 1:
[32:25] Yeah. I mean, I think it's pretty self-explanatory. If any state redistricts, I think it all has come the way I read it, then Virginia is allowed to redistrict, which, spoiler alert, is going to happen. So you might get another one of these in 2033.

Speaker 2:
[32:39] Well, yeah, I want to talk about the possible sun setting provision first. But let's talk about, so the General Assembly, it's not like they were waiting for this amendment to pass to then craft a new map. They've already drawn a map, right?

Speaker 1:
[32:55] Yeah, they are. I mean, it's been out. So I don't think our viewership doesn't know what this map looks like. But yeah, they've already drawn a map, creates four new Democratic districts, goes from six to five, ten to one. That was a precondition of doing this. Right.

Speaker 2:
[33:09] And that's a huge swing, right? I mean, you've said Texas was designed to maybe shift up to five seats, but there really only three Republican seats that that map guarantees. This would guarantee four additional Democratic seats, which seems like again, maybe the Republicans shouldn't have started a war if they weren't prepared to win, and maybe that's a metaphor for the entire Trump administration. But let's talk about specifically what the new map would do versus the old map.

Speaker 1:
[33:40] So to the Virginia Independent Redistricting Commission's credit, the old map, I mean, it was basically fine, pretty proportional, a couple of super damn Nova-based districts, a couple of super blue Richmond, Virginia Beach-based districts, a couple of competitive seats, and then some very, very red ones in rural Virginia. This map basically takes Nova and draws a bunch of straight lines into the rural counties to put them in with Nova, to make all the seats relatively lean blue to save blue. I think Virginia 6, the new Virginia 6 is a really good example of this. The old Virginia 6 really went from southwest Virginia to the Virginia exurbs, but I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but Trump won it by probably 40 or maybe 30 somewhere in there. It's now going to be a, I believe, Harris plus five or six seat. They did this by pushing part of Loudoun County in with the rural areas to make it more Republican. They did this all over the state. There's one very Republican seat in southwest Virginia, and the rest of it is an urban area and a bunch of rural areas, making sure that those seats are Democratic.

Speaker 2:
[35:00] Yeah, and again, this is an audio medium. So let's see if we can't draw as much of a visual picture as we can for that. If Virginia is shaped like a triangle, and at the apex of the triangle, it's a triangle that skews from the southwest to the northeast. At the apex of the triangle is where a significant chunk of the population lives, and in particular, that chunk that is heavily democratic. There are a couple of others just on the lower right part of the triangle is the Norfolk-Virginia Beach area, which is also more democratic. In between those two is Richmond, which is also a democratic area. What you have to do in order to take densely packed Democrats that live in cities, that have a high population density, is draw congressional districts with these lines radiating out that make the congressional district now extend for hundreds of miles and include swaths of the rural voters in order to balance out those Republican votes in rural areas with the Democrats that are packed into the city's suburbs, exurbs. Am I getting that right?

Speaker 1:
[36:25] Pretty much exactly right.

Speaker 2:
[36:43] Okay, so can we talk about some of the specific districts and how they're going to change in terms of voter composition?

Speaker 1:
[36:51] Yeah, so I think let's start with Virginia's second district because I think it actually changed the least. This is in Southeast Virginia. It's the city of Virginia Beach, some kind of the peninsula off the Virginia coast, and then some Republican suburbs, which make it about a Trump plus one seat going in. This is represented by, currently represented by Republican Jen Kagan's. The new map actually doesn't change all that much, but it does shift the border a little bit further into Norfolk and takes out some of that rural territory that Republicans need to win and shifts it to a Harris plus four seat. Jen Kagan's was already in trouble anyway. Former Congresswoman Elaine Luria, who Jen Kagan's beat in 2022 in this seat is mounting a comeback bid, and I think tonight she got a huge boost if she wasn't already favored.

Speaker 2:
[37:45] Right. So Virginia's second, that was an R plus one seat, which Republicans are going to lose a lot of these toss up districts if the current trends hold by the midterms, but it's going to shift five or six points towards the Democrats. And it's really going to make that a safe Democratic seat.

Speaker 1:
[38:02] Yeah. I mean, there's a kind of a counterpoint here. There's kind of another point here, which is that Republicans in these seats kind of had to know this was coming and had the opportunity to moderate and just didn't.

Speaker 2:
[38:14] But that's a really excellent point.

Speaker 1:
[38:16] I mean, not for nothing, they've probably known this was coming since Spanberger I. And you had a chance to vote for a partisan gerrymandering ban and do well and moderate and push back on the president, and you just didn't. So I don't really feel any sympathy for you. Sucks to suck. Anyway, let's move on with the districts.

Speaker 2:
[38:39] OK, that's Virginia too.

Speaker 1:
[38:40] Yep. So this Virginia one and Virginia eight kind of got meshed together here. So we'll call this Virginia, the new Virginia eight, which is partially the old Virginia eight and the new Virginia one. So this district, I think, is a really good example of taking going from super, super urban blue area all the way into rural Virginia. So the old Virginia eight was represented by Don Byer and which is based in Arlington. So he represented a Harris Plus 49 seat. And to make the Tender One gerrymandered possible, you have to unpack it. So what the Virginia legislature did was draw his seat all the way from Arlington down to the kind of the Tidewater area, that part of rural Eastern Virginia, and make it about a Harris Plus, I think it's 15-ish seat. So it was going to be safe, them regardless, but it unpacks a lot of Arlington, and puts it in with rural Virginia to make it safe, democratic, but still to ensure that Don Beyer, the incumbent, holds on.

Speaker 2:
[39:50] And let me make sure that I'm... I use the phrase unpacking that, but one of the aspects, one of the kind of core aspects of how you engineer a political gerrymander is packing and cracking. That is, you figure out the level at which you consider a safe congressional district, be it seven or eight points, ten points, however you want to draw that line. And then for the party whose votes you're trying to minimize, why not give them, if they're going to get eight or ten or 12 points anyway, why not have it be a Democrat plus 40 district? We've seen that in red states where they're trying to make sure that Democratic votes are packed into one particular area. Or alternatively, if you have a geographic space that is split roughly 50-50, if you crack the other party's votes in that district and spread them out into multiple congressional districts, you can dilute that vote, you can take an area that is geographically very, very close and make it look like it strongly favors the other party. And layer on top of that, that as we talked about at the top of this segment, Democrats tend to live in cities. Cities tend to have a higher population density. And so there's kind of an asymmetry with respect to packing where if you just draw the lines where people live, if you just sort of drew a weighted grid on a map with no other considerations, you would wind up geographically favoring Republicans and disfavoring Democrats. There's a lot of Democratic votes would be effectively, quote, wasted, right? Would be packed into these dense Democratic districts in it. And so I think what I hear you saying is that the old Virginia 1 district was heavily packed Democratic, and the new Virginia 8 is going to sit over top that. It is still going to be a Democratic district, but it's going to redistribute a lot of those Democrats so that they can participate in other congressional districts.

Speaker 1:
[41:59] Right. So just for clarification, the district is going to be numbered Virginia 8, but basically what they did is as a gross over simplification, they took half of the current Virginia 8 and put it in with most of the current Virginia 1 to make a Harris plus 17 districts.

Speaker 2:
[42:18] Right.

Speaker 1:
[42:19] So that, Rob, just for possibility sake, and just to be clear, that knocks out longtime Virginia Republican incumbent Rob Whitman, who represents the current Virginia 1.

Speaker 2:
[42:30] Got it.

Speaker 1:
[42:30] Let's talk about just a couple of the districts that are currently represented by them incumbents, which will still be represented by them incumbents, but look really a lot weirder now. So in order to free up Democratic votes, which we'll talk about from Richmond, they had to go get them from Nova. And so this is where probably some of you have seen the Lobster District or whatever.

Speaker 2:
[42:54] Right. That's the seventh, right?

Speaker 1:
[42:56] That's right. Yeah, the new Virginia seventh. That's what this district is. So it goes from Fairfax County all the way down to just random areas in Southwest Virginia and just rural Virginia around Richmond to create a Harris Plus 8 seat. This actually strengthens the seat, weirdly enough. So Eugene Vidman, who currently represents VA seven, it's unclear which seat he'll run for now. I think the answer is VA one, the new VA one. That seat went from, again, this is all kind of an approximation because the map's way different now. That seat went from Harris Plus 2 to Harris Plus 8 just by adding a lot of NOVA, right?

Speaker 2:
[43:39] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[43:40] So just because we're going to sit here and talk about this all day. There are five districts right now that run from NOVA, so Arlington, Fairfax County, Loudoun County into the surrounding Virginia areas and into surrounding Virginia rural areas, all of which are safe democratic but have a lot, are going to be represented by probably someone in NOVA, but represent a lot of rural territory. Let's move on to the real genius and or crazy part of this gerrymander.

Speaker 2:
[44:12] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[44:12] So let's talk about VA5 currently. So necessarily to push Dems out of Richmond, which they needed to make VA5 bluer. They put some of the rural voters, they're currently in VA5, which was not like a safe Trump seat. Trump only won it by 12 points. It could have swung in the correct year, say, I don't know, 2026. But they put some of the Dems or the Republicans from that seat in with seats with NOVA, and put some Dems out of VA4 and put them in with the rural areas. This is probably not great podcasting, but we're rolling into that. So what you would get is the new Virginia 5 goes from Trump plus 12 to Harris plus 9 by adding a ton of the Richmond suburbs and part of actual Richmond in and just putting it in with rural Virginia. And then my favorite seat of this is the college gerrymander is what I'll call it. For those not familiar with Virginia geography, Virginia has a lot of colleges, UVA, Virginia Tech, James Madison, Liberty, if you're a fan of that, that are all kind of in Western Virginia. They're all out in the mountains out there. If you ever take I-81 up the Virginia mountains, it's one of the most beautiful drives in the United States. But every 100 miles along I-81, you hit a college. So you start with Radford, Virginia Tech, and you end up in Harrisonburg, which is where James Madison is. But what the Virginia Dems astutely realize they could do is that those college towns are extremely democratic. And if you draw all of them into one seat, you can actually get a narrow Harris seat. And so what they ended up doing is what I'll call the college gerrymander here. So they took Harrisonburg, where JMU is, Charlottesville, where UVA is, Amherst, Lynchburg, where University of Lynchburg is, and just followed I-81 all the way down to Virginia Tech. And there's no currency, but the old VA-6, I believe, was Trump plus 24. That shifts that to a Harris plus three seat. And it's a really creative thing. It's a really creative seat they drew. So basically, it's going to be kind of college professors and college kids versus rural Virginia, and the college professors and college kids are going to win.

Speaker 2:
[46:44] Yeah. So this is the new Virginia sixth district.

Speaker 1:
[46:48] Yes, correct. Yes, this is the new Virginia sixth.

Speaker 2:
[46:52] So anything else we want to talk about on the district by district level?

Speaker 1:
[46:56] I think this map, while it looks really unappealing, is actually pretty well done for what they wanted to accomplish. So credit to them for getting this done and passed to voters.

Speaker 2:
[47:06] Yeah. So unpack a little bit about what you mean by that, because I know I have my thoughts.

Speaker 1:
[47:15] So after Spanberger won and Virginia announced they were going to redistrict, I think most people, myself included, thought, okay, we'll probably go nine to two. So we'll have two super rural districts, and then we'll have basically nine kind of safer Democratic districts, and that'll be fine. And to the Senate Pro Tems president, Louise Lucas, and Speaker Bobby Scott and Spanberger, they decided that, no, we're going for this. We're going for 10 to 1, which in a Harris Plus Six state is very, very hard to do. And it was harder to sell to the voters. I mean, nine to two, okay. I mean, it's a blue state and it's close, but Spanberger won, okay, I get it. But 10 to 1 is really hard to sell to the voters, that you should have 90 percent of the seats in the state, you would get 53 percent of the vote in. Yep, and it's just hard to draw and hard to draw and hard to sell to people. And to their credit, they got this past. So major, major credit to Governor Spanberger. I don't think Louise Lucas is the Senate President, but Louise Lucas and Speaker Scott over there in Virginia.

Speaker 2:
[48:21] Okay. Well, Joe, thank you so much for the granular breakdown on the district by district level. We're also going to talk about some of the pending and anticipated legal challenges to this map in the main segment. And I just want to say, I hate looking at this map. I appreciate this is your job and these are the new rules of the road. And if Chief Justice John Roberts is going to say political gerrymandering is fine to the victor go the spoils. Well, we were the victor and these are the spoils. But this new map looks like paint rolling down in terms of these districts that are hundreds of miles long and just violate every principle of geographic compactness and regional fairness that I think a map ought to have. So I hate it. I'm glad we're doing it, but I hate it.

Speaker 1:
[49:23] Just one kind of general point. You said that about the redistricting war. Dems won the redistricting war.

Speaker 2:
[49:28] Yeah. That's what you said last time. Even though we had the Supreme Court put its thumb on the scale, that's still your take?

Speaker 1:
[49:40] Yeah. I mean, Texas got this all kicked off, but between California and Virginia, that's nine seats right there, which is just tough to combat. And, you know, Texas probably will get a couple.

Speaker 2:
[49:52] Yeah. Redistricting, partisan redistricting failed in Indiana.

Speaker 1:
[49:57] It failed in Indiana. North Carolina drew one seat, and that's looking a little tedious right now. That also, if things get bad for Republicans, that gerrymator could break. I don't think it will, but it could break.

Speaker 2:
[50:09] And by that, again, just so that we're clear, wherever you pick as the threshold for your safe district, Republicans could easily fall below that in these midterms because of how drastically unpopular they are. So if the nationwide mood swings 10 points to Democrats, and you have an R plus 9 seat, all of a sudden you lose. And we've seen that happen before. I guess, I mean, are there other areas in which Republicans could continue to go to war to try and squeeze out other seats? What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 1:
[50:46] Well, there's obviously Kalei, which the ruling could be coming tomorrow, but even then, just due to our handy dandy Purcell principle, I don't really see it impacting any states this cycle. Like Mississippi, a state that would probably draw out their lone Democratic incumbents already had their primaries. That's gonna happen. Louisiana, that's probably too late. Alabama is too late. We'll see what happens in Florida. I have some probably positive news that I can't really share on the air, but yeah, there's a special session, which was supposed to be happening today, which has been pushed back to a week from today to deal with congressional redistricting. Let's just say the boot in Tallahassee is kind of soured on the prospect of congressional redistricting. I'm not saying they won't do it, but the sort of aggressive, well, we're gonna draw out five Democratic incumbents. Not happening. Well, I don't wanna say not happening. You never know with these people, but just kind of inside baseball, governor DeSantis really wants to do it. Senate President Albritton and Speaker Perez, or the Republican Speaker, Republican Senate President, are very lukewarm on the idea to say. And they also, just for even more inside baseball, they added some AI legislation. And on top of that, they still have to pass the budget in the special session. So we'll see what they do, but it's not gonna be able to counteract Virginia. And I feel pretty safe about that.

Speaker 2:
[52:14] Yeah, and I guess you tell me if you disagree, but if you're looking for optimism at it, there's a sort of a mutually assured destruction outcome here, right? Like if what you say is, okay, if partisan gerrymandering is gonna be on the table and Democrats are able to fight back in a way that either fights that to a draw or actually makes that a loss, then maybe you can look for something in the future when our politics are less broken and after we've solved an insurmountable list of problems already on the table, but maybe say, hey, let's mutually disarm, let's step back from the brink, let's put these in the hands of truly neutral redistricting commissions, and maybe we can collectively walk back from the brink. Am I just hopelessly naïve on that one?

Speaker 1:
[53:17] Six months ago, I would have said probably. Now, just because of what happened, I do wonder if this might be coming down the road. I don't think it well. I just don't see the advantage for Republicans to do it. Yeah. Albeit, I didn't think that the Democrats would run the redistricting war and they did.

Speaker 2:
[53:35] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[53:35] And so, you have to think about, well, is the calculus, is it worth it politically for Republicans to do it? And it's probably still not, especially just with reapportionment coming up in the next cycle and blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 2:
[53:51] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[53:51] But I do think the likelihood that, especially if you get a Dem trifecta, you could see some redistricting reform and I think that is much, much needed as much as it would put me out of, you know, cause me business. It would be very needed around the country.

Speaker 2:
[54:07] Well, I am glad to hear that there is some patriotic spirit there, even if it is not in your self-interest. All right. Joe Dye, I'm going to give you the last word here. And thank you so much.

Speaker 1:
[54:21] Ten to one. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 3:
[54:49] And we're back. Well, you and Joe were not the only ones with thoughts about Virginia's results. Counterpoint, counterpoint, a rigged election took place last night in the great Commonwealth of Virginia. All day long, Republicans were winning. The spirit was unbelievable until the very end, when of course, there was a massive mail-in ballot drop. Where have I heard that before? And the Democrats eeked out another crooked victory. Six to five goes ten to one, and yet the presidential election in November was very close to a 50-50 split. Sorry, it's a little hairball there. Correct. In addition to everything else, the language on the referendum was purposefully unintelligible and deceptive. As everyone knows, I am an extraordinarily brilliant person, and even I had no idea what the hell they were talking about in the referendum, and neither do they. Let's see if the courts will fix this travesty of Justice President Donald J. Trump. You know, when you're illiterate, reading is hard. I think, all right, let's pretend that this is like not just made up. There wasn't a 50-50 split. I think it was like 50. I mean, she won by six points, right? It was, and I think everybody understood exactly what the purpose of this referendum was.

Speaker 2:
[56:09] How would you know to be mad about it if you didn't?

Speaker 3:
[56:12] And they did not get a big mail-in ballot drop. In fact, it was same-day voting. That, you know, it looked like it might not pass until the same-day voting from Northern Virginia. I have now heard that they are planning to possibly DNX the parts of Arlington and Alexandria.

Speaker 2:
[56:32] Oh, cede it back to Washington, DC.?

Speaker 3:
[56:35] And then, they won't have this problem anymore. They can just disenfranchise more people. Good luck, Frank.

Speaker 2:
[56:41] That would have to pass the state legislature. I suspect Northern Virginia might have something to say about that.

Speaker 3:
[56:47] I suspect they would.

Speaker 2:
[56:48] That's the point that Joe made at the very beginning of our interview, right? The more they retaliate against the federal government, the bluer they're making Northern Virginia.

Speaker 3:
[56:57] Right. I mean, thank you, Doge, right? I think this probably would have passed because people are so incensed at the way that the Trump administration has ordered up further gerrymandering of a country which has already gerrymandered to hell and said, oh, it's not fair. You have to draw the maps in our favor. But okay, let's pretend that he was talking about a real thing. There is a lawsuit which was filed by the Republican National Committee back in February in Tazewell County, Virginia. It's a tiny place, almost on the Kentucky border in Western Virginia. In the Tazewell County Courthouse, there is one judge, Jack Hurley, who has twice issued injunctions trying to prevent this amendment from going on the ballot and has been twice overruled by the Virginia Supreme Court. So the RNC trotted back to Tazewell County, and Judge Hurley issued a third injunction on Wednesday, this time declaring that the amendment was void ab initio, that is, from the beginning, and therefore all the votes, both for and against it, needed to be thrown in the trash. The Virginia Department of Elections has already appealed. I mean, do we think that this is going to be successful this time around?

Speaker 2:
[58:03] No. Look, this lawsuit is just Judge Hurley buying the RNC's entire grab bag of terrible arguments. So, I mean, let's kind of look at, do our best to steal bottom, right? So, the first argument is the point that Trump tried to make in that truth social post, right? Judge Hurley held that the ballot language, quote, submits to the voters a flagrantly misleading question that did not accurately describe the proposed amendment. That's what his order says. That, in turn, Judge Hurley says, violates what's known as the submissions clause of Article 12, Section 1 of the Virginia Constitution. That says that it shall be the duty of the General Assembly to submit proposed constitutional amendments to the voter. There are really two components to this argument. First was that what the legislature submitted to the voters was misleading, and second, that if it was misleading, the remedy would be for a court in Tazewell County to throw out all the votes and I don't know, maybe have a do-over, maybe do nothing. Just on that latter point, I looked, I cannot find a single case in Virginia history where court has ever overturned the results of an election based on the submissions clause.

Speaker 3:
[59:19] Well, I mean, counterpoint, president extraordinarily brilliant, just pretty sure he knows how this goes. No, obviously that's bullshit. Here's what was submitted to the voters. Question, should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections while ensuring Virginia's standard redistricting process resumes for all future redistricting after the 2030 census? Like, I mean, I don't have any trouble understanding it. And with all the publicity, who the hell didn't know? Who the hell didn't know what this is about? I think everybody in Virginia understood what this was about.

Speaker 2:
[59:56] Yeah, I think that's right. Look, you have to summarize. You can't just put on a ballot, this will amend Article 2, Section 7, because people aren't lawyers. You have to explain it to them. And is there a long-standing history that the party in charge can describe that maybe in a way that puts a thumb on the sky? Restore fairness in the upcoming election? Sure, but that is what the legislature does. This absolutely objectively described the effect of the amendment. It is to amend the Constitution, to temporarily allow in off-district cycles the state legislature to draw a new map. So, I don't know. But even if that were confusing, again, I just want to go back to the remedy. Like, I don't know, maybe you would be able to get an injunction. I could imagine, right, if the legislature took a bill that say banned abortion and put it on the ballot and said, this protects a woman's right to an abortion, right? Okay, fine. The remedy there would be you sue in advance, you get an injunction, you force them to rewrite the ballot.

Speaker 3:
[61:01] I mean, ask Ron DeSantis how that goes. This is a thing that they do in Florida all the time. DeSantis is always trying to make these, either make the language of the amendment, which he doesn't like, sound completely crazy, or to gobble the gook up the language of the amendments that he does like. Right.

Speaker 2:
[61:18] And we've had very limited success in challenging that, but the idea that the remedy would be for any degree of overstatement to throw out the votes of over 3 million people is kind of on brand for Trump's Republican Party.

Speaker 3:
[61:33] Rudy Giuliani, Rudy Giuliani, as I recall, in the 2020 election cycle asked the judge in Pennsylvania to statistically adjust the votes in Philadelphia, just give it a haircut so that it would put Trump over the edge.

Speaker 2:
[61:48] Did not work. Yeah. Okay. The next legal sounding argument that Judge Hurley bid on is that the resolution adopting that ballot question was void of an issue because it exceeded the authority of the legislature special session. It makes a reference to joint resolution of 428. It has this whereas clause that the special session was convened for the purpose of considering budget bills and redistricting isn't the budget, which even if that were true, that would not be a justiciable claim, right? And even if it were justiciable, the RNC does not have standing to challenge how the Virginia House of Delegates interprets its own rules. And by the way, it's not true. I will spare you all of the subsequent history. Look, there are a ton of other kind of garbage arguments. There's a form of laws clause. There is the judge enjoined it because it's on two different subject matters, right? Like, you know, I get...

Speaker 3:
[62:45] I've actually seen that, right? That's one of the things. You can't have two things in a ballot initiative.

Speaker 2:
[62:52] There's apparently a walk and chew gum clause in the Virginia Constitution.

Speaker 3:
[62:55] No, no, no, that's a regular thing. Like, that's a regular law. I mean, it's got nothing to do with what's here. But lots of states have... You can't have two things in any one ballot initiative because people will get confused.

Speaker 2:
[63:08] Well, and I understand that. Like, you wouldn't want people to vote to amend the Constitution to, like, give out free candy but also disenfranchise everyone under 30, right? Who knows, right? But my point is...

Speaker 3:
[63:21] Disenfranchise all Gen X. I kind of deserve it. Pass that ballot initiative. I think I would vote for it.

Speaker 2:
[63:25] We have not covered ourselves in glory. Ugh, we're the worst. Yeah, so look, this is a very Republican judge in a very Republican part of the state that is throwing everything at the wall, hoping something sticks. There's nothing to stick. This is a constitutional amendment passed by the voters. And as we've seen from the Supreme Court, like, the new rules of the road are, if you are up front about gerrymandering for political purpose, that's the new normal.

Speaker 3:
[63:50] Yeah, they started it, we finished it as Queen Louise Lucas said.

Speaker 2:
[63:55] Yeah, I do hope so. I guess I do want to add one little bit on finish because we are taking a much deserved victory lap here. But this map is terrible for democracy in an objective sense, right? Like the old map, which was drawn by an independent commission, is what congressional map should look like. We'll put both maps in the show notes. A state that's six points democratic probably should not be 10 to 1. The old map had multiple competitive districts. They were reasonably geographically compact. It passed the smell test. The new map is gerrymandered to reach this edge. Northern Virginia voters are split among five different congressional districts that extend over a hundred miles. It's terrible. So I don't want unilateral disarmament. You don't want unilateral disarmament. As we're trying to fix our democracy, ideally, I'd like to have maybe mutual disarmament. We'll give you back Virginia. If you give us North Carolina is a 50-50 state that split 11 to 3 Republicans. Wisconsin is blue. It's a Democratic state that's split 6-2 Republican. You give, we'll give, but until you back down, we're not backing down. What do you think?

Speaker 3:
[65:07] I think that even if we had independent redistricting for Congress, we would still have the Senate, and the Senate is gerrymandered to shit because Wyoming gets two senators and California gets two senators. I'm not mad at you, Wyoming. I mean, I'm not mad at you personally. I mean, okay, a little. I'm a little mad at you because John Barrasso. But I mean, I'm not mad at Wyoming. It's not Wyoming's fault that this is how it worked out, but that we're totally gerrymandered in favor of places which are increasing. Look, it's no secret we have a rural-urban divide in this country and that it is a lot of rural places that vote Republican. But I guess I'm not real interested in the discussion right now about how this isn't right or how we have reservations about doing this and how it feels like we're disenfranchising Republicans. Like, I don't give a shit. I don't give a shit. I'm tired of being kicked in the throat by people who already have every advantage and are trying to retcon every goddamn thing to turn themselves into victims. I'm tired of hearing that January 6th are victims. I'm tired of hearing that the Aryan Nation have been victimized because they were subsidized in some way by sneaky SPLC. No, I'm tired of this. Punch them in the throat. I don't just just do it. So on that happy note of throat punching, that will do it for us this week. Have a lovely weekend trying to punch anybody in the throat, unless they're... No, no punch anybody in the throat. No, no throat punching, no defamation, none of that. Just go outside and enjoy the warm air.

Speaker 4:
[66:50] Law and Chaos podcast is production of Raise Up to Media, LLC. Is intended solely as entertainment, does not constitute legal advice, and does not form an attorney-client relationship. This show is researched and written by Liz Dye and produced by Bryce Blankenegel. Law and Chaos podcast, copyright Raise Up to Media, LLC. All rights reserved.