Virginia Democrats on Monday turned to the nation’s highest court in an effort to salvage congressional district lines that voters approved just last month but that the Virginia Supreme Court struck down three days earlier. The emergency application asks the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the state ruling, which found that the Democratic-controlled legislature improperly initiated the redistricting amendment process after early voting had already begun in last fall’s general election.
“The Court overrode the will of the people who ratified the amendment by ordering the Commonwealth to conduct its election with the congressional districts that the people rejected,” wrote the lawyers for Virginia Democrats and Attorney General Jay Jones. “The irreparable harm resulting from the Supreme Court of Virginia’s decision is profound and immediate.”
The appeal is the latest maneuver in a mid-decade redistricting race that President Donald Trump ignited last year by urging Republican-led states to redraw their congressional boundaries. It was supercharged days after the Virginia measure passed, when the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority issued a ruling that effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act, paving the way for Southern states to eliminate majority-Black districts and further pad GOP margins in Congress.
Republican leaders have claimed that their redistricting efforts have already netted more than a dozen additional House seats. The Virginia amendment, once passed, briefly appeared to offset those gains and turn the nationwide redistricting scramble into a draw.
The legal odds facing the Democratic appeal are long. The U.S. Supreme Court consistently avoids second-guessing state courts’ interpretations of their own constitutions. In 2023, the justices declined to hear a request from North Carolina Republicans to overturn a state Supreme Court decision that had blocked the GOP’s congressional map.
Politically, the appeal could still serve Democrats’ election-year messaging. By highlighting the high court’s recent actions — including a decision that allowed Louisiana Republicans to proceed with a map after the justices struck down a majority-Black district — the party can argue that the Supreme Court is enabling partisan gerrymandering.
The Virginia Supreme Court, whose justices are appointed by the legislature and are not viewed as having a clear ideological tilt, voted 4-3 to strike down the amendment. The majority held that the legislature improperly began the process after early voting had started, violating a state constitutional requirement for a full election cycle before such a change.
The Virginia amendment had been launched as a counterweight to Republican redistricting gains in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and a new map in Florida. With its invalidation, the balance of the redistricting fight tilted back toward Republicans, deepening the Democrats’ uphill climb to recapture the House in November.