The 416-page appeal from the Republican speaker of the Virginia legislature prods the U.S. Supreme Court to consider “paradigmatic” errors made by the district court in their decision to declare 11 House districts unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered.
Delegate Stephen Heretick (D-Portsmouth) came out against the House Democratic redistricting plan calling it “gerrymandering in response to gerrymandering. It’s tit-for-tat. It’s, in the immortal words of baseball great Yogi Berra, ‘it is deja vu all over again.'”
The map revealed by House Democrats on Wednesday shows changes in 29 of the Commonwealth’s 100 legislative districts, causing the GOP leadership to rail against the revamped boundaries.
State lawmakers will come back to Richmond at the end of month to redraw the legislative districts. Meanwhile, the GOP is filing paperwork to the Supreme Court to have the lower court’s ruling overturned.
Throwing cold water on the project, new research from UCLA and Yale suggest that independent redistricting doesn’t improve competition within districts.
