High Court to Virginia: ‘Here Is the Limit of Your Authority’

The high court of the Old Dominion is proving its mettle as a watchdog of the state’s constitution — in the drafting of which Framers like Jefferson, Madison, and George Mason had a hand. Faced with a Democratic scheme to rig the state’s voting maps in an attempt to tilt House control, the robed sages, by four to three, struck the gerrymander as an affront to fairness and to the language of a state charter that predates the Declaration of Independence.The Virginia court’s ruling vindicates principles of due process and the rule of law that the Framers’ generation sought, in both state and federal constitutions, to preserve for “ourselves and our posterity.” The opinion is peppered with the names of famous Founders, many of them Virginians, like Madison, John Marshall, and George Wythe. There are cameos, too, from champions of the definition of words, Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster.Insights from Johnson and Webster bear on the dispute because the Democrats sought to redefine the word election in order to get their gerrymander passed. The state charter requires that proposed amendments need to be passed by two sessions of the legislature, separated by an election, before being submitted to the voters. The Virginia proposal was first passed by legislators on October 31, 2025 — yet the state’s election started on September 19.During arguments in the case, lawyers for the Democrats sought, in what these columns called “a master class in contortion,” to explain away this discrepancy. The fact that the Democrats had proposed a constitutional amendment after 1.3 million ballots, or 40 percent of the total, had been cast, was, one lawyer asserted, “a problem that someone accepts for voting early.” The high court majority called this circumstance “wholly unprecedented in Virginia’s history.”The high court majority also skewered the Democrats’ claims that the gerrymander was a means to “restore fairness.” The map sought by the Democrats would have removed four Republicans from the state’s delegation to the United States House, giving Democrats 10 of 11 seats. So, the court said, “47 percent of Virginians that voted for” the GOP “in the last congressional election would now be represented by 9 percent of Virginia’s delegation.”It’s hard to anticipate under what logic that demarche could be defended under the rubric of “fairness.” That is one reason why, the majority suggests, the state constitution has an amendment process that “may seem laborious to some, perhaps even painstakingly so.” Yet “the ambition of a constitution,” the justices aver, citing Madison, is to forge “a Government for perpetuity” based on “permanent principles and not on those of a temporary nature.”A “constitutional republic,” the majority says, follows Chief Justice Marshall’s assertion that the role of “the judicial department” is “to say what the law is.” Marshall, the court adds, “learned this truth two decades earlier from his former law professor, another Virginian, George Wythe.” A signer of the Declaration, a delegate at the Constitutional Convention, and a judge, Wythe stressed courts’ “duty” to set the “constitutional boundaries of political power.” Wythe’s “admonition was timeless,” the high court majority writes: “If the whole legislature, an event to be deprecated, should attempt to overleap the bounds, prescribed to them by the people, I, in administering the public justice of the country, will meet the united powers, at my seat in this tribunal; and, pointing to the constitution, will say, to them, here is the limit of your authority; and, hither, shall you go, but no further.”

High Court to Virginia: ‘Here Is the Limit of Your Authority’

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