Days after producing a Supreme Court motion riddled with typos in their bid to reinstate a gerrymandered congressional map, Virginia Democrats filed a new motion to the high court — this time with an even bigger mistake.
Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones on Monday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to set aside the state Supreme Court ruling last week that struck down the Democrats’ map because the legislature broke procedural rules in rushing it to voters.
The emergency motion, however, was erroneously addressed to the Supreme Court of Virginia.
The mistake followed an earlier version of the motion that misspelled “Virginia” and “senator.” In the filing sent to the high court on Monday, “Virginia” is misspelled once again, but only on Page 53.
The new flub drew sarcastic criticism from state Republicans, who were already trashing the party’s Hail Mary attempt to get the Supreme Court to revive their gerrymandered map.
“Good News: Dems managed to spell Virginia correctly,” said Jason Miyares, the state’s former Attorney General and a Republican. “Bad News: They sent their emergency application to SCOTUS to the wrong court. Baby steps.”
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Virginia Democrats mislabeled the motion as they rushed to try to reinstate their partisan map, which was narrowly approved in an April 22 voter referendum.
If the Virginia Supreme Court had not scuttled the map, it would have skewed the state’s congressional districts to the Democrats by a margin of 10-1, meaning just one congressional district would likely vote for a GOP candidate in November. Democrats stood to pick up four additional U.S. House seats in the hotly contested battle to control Congress.
Now that the map has been tossed out and the current congressional map stands. It would likely give Democrats six congressional seats and Republicans five in the November election.
The lawsuit is one of several last-ditch ideas Democrats floated in the wake of last week’s decision.
Another idea was to have the legislature impose a new, lower mandatory retirement age on the state Supreme Court, which would automatically oust the members who voted against the map and give Democrats in the legislature a chance to fill those seats and secure a new ruling.
In addition to turning a political war into a nuclear attack, that idea would also test the state’s calendar, which envisions August primaries, with early voting beginning as soon as June 18.
Election administrators must finalize those ballots by May 28, Mr. Jones told the justices.
“This court should not permit the Supreme Court of Virginia to short-circuit that process by overturning the commonwealth’s lawfully adopted maps at the last minute,” he wrote.
The Virginia Supreme Court majority, in its ruling last week, pointed out that Mr. Jones himself created the time crunch. He had urged the state court to wait until after the April 21 referendum before issuing its ruling.
• Susan Ferrechio can be reached at sferrechio@washingtontimes.com.
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