Virginia Democrats file redistricting appeal to the wrong Supreme Court, drawing sharp criticism

Virginia Democrats managed to address their emergency redistricting appeal to the Supreme Court of Virginia, the very court that had just ruled against them, instead of the Supreme Court of the United States, where they intended to send it. Former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares was the first to pounce, sharing an image of the mislabeled filing on social media.

The blunder capped a week of embarrassments for the state party's redistricting push, which had already suffered a fatal legal blow when Virginia's highest court struck down a constitutional amendment that Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger had fast-tracked to undo the state's gerrymandering protections.

The filing error matters because it is not an isolated typo. It is the latest in a string of sloppy legal work from the same team trying to redraw Virginia's congressional map, a map that would have eliminated as many as four Republican-leaning districts and, as Newsmax reported, could have shifted the state's delegation from a 6-5 Democratic edge to as much as 10-1.

Wrong court, wrong spelling, wrong process

Miyares, who served as Virginia's Republican attorney general, posted about the mix-up on X on Tuesday. As Fox News Digital reported, the emergency petition was emblazoned with an address "to the Supreme Court of Virginia", not the U.S. Supreme Court, where Democrats hoped to keep their redistricting fight alive.

Miyares did not let the moment pass quietly:

"Good news: Dems managed to spell Virginia correctly. Bad news: They sent their emergency application to SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) to the wrong court. Baby steps."

The "spell Virginia correctly" line was not random. Days earlier, on Friday, Miyares had flagged that Democrats misspelled the state's own name as "Virgnia" in their filing to the Supreme Court. The same document rendered "Senator" as "Sentator."

These are not the kinds of errors that inspire confidence in a legal team asking the nation's highest court to intervene in a state redistricting dispute.

The ruling that started the unraveling

Late last week, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that Spanberger had improperly fast-tracked a constitutional amendment that temporarily undid state-level prohibitions on gerrymandering. The court found that Spanberger's redistricting push skirted a clear requirement: any constitutional amendment in Virginia must receive approval from two separate sessions of the state legislature, decisively separated by an election, before it can go to a statewide referendum.

By the time the referendum reached consideration in the General Assembly last year, early voting for 2025 had already begun. The court concluded the amendment's consideration had not been meaningfully separated by a full election and therefore could not be upheld.

A Washington Examiner report added that a Virginia circuit court had earlier blocked certification of the redistricting referendum, which passed by roughly 3 percent, and issued an injunction keeping the current congressional maps in place while the case moved through appeals. Former Gov. Glenn Youngkin said at the time: "Virginians know a 10-1 map is not Virginia."

The stakes were enormous. The proposed maps would have redrawn Virginia's congressional boundaries so aggressively that Rep. John McGuire said his Republican-leaning 5th District would have been turned into a heavily Democratic seat, diluting rural representation across the state.

A pattern of overreach

Virginia's redistricting debacle fits a broader pattern of Democratic leadership pursuing aggressive strategies that collapse under legal or procedural scrutiny. The party's argument in its emergency petition, that the Virginia Supreme Court "impermissibly transgressed the ordinary bounds of judicial review", amounts to telling the U.S. Supreme Court that a state court got its own state constitution wrong. That is a steep hill to climb under any circumstances. Filing the petition to the wrong court does not help the cause.

McGuire, speaking on Newsmax, framed the episode bluntly: "Democrats tried to cheat" and were "trying to steal" before the ruling stopped them. He added: "Hakeem Jeffries doesn't care about truth. He just wants power. And the Supreme Court did the right thing."

Jeffries, for his part, has projected confidence that Democrats will flip the House regardless of the Virginia setback. But confidence without competence has a shelf life. The party's leadership under Jeffries has drawn criticism before for saying one thing and doing another on major legislative fights.

It is unclear when, or whether, the U.S. Supreme Court will take up the matter. Virginia is now asking the justices to weigh in on what is fundamentally a question of state-level constitutional procedure, a posture that invites skepticism from a court that generally defers to state courts on state law.

Broader Democratic miscalculations

The Virginia redistricting fiasco is not happening in isolation. Across multiple fronts, Democrats have pursued aggressive legal and political strategies that have stalled or backfired. Their own members have conceded that impeachment pushes have no path to success, yet leadership continues to float them.

The party has also faced criticism for prioritizing political theater over substantive governance, a tendency that even some prominent lifelong Democrats have found difficult to defend. Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard Law School professor emeritus who spent decades as a registered Democrat, recently announced he was switching to the Republican Party. Just The News reported that Dershowitz said the Democratic Party's shift toward radicalism drove his decision.

"I believe that the Democratic Party's hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world. So I intend to work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate."

Dershowitz's departure is one data point. But it reflects a growing sense, even among people who once called the party home, that Democratic leadership is more interested in acquiring power than in governing responsibly.

Meanwhile, Democrats have escalated legal battles on election-related policy and used congressional hearings for what critics see as unserious attacks, raising questions about whether the party's legal and political infrastructure is being stretched too thin across too many fronts.

What happens next in Virginia

For now, the current congressional maps remain in place. The Virginia Supreme Court's ruling stands. The circuit court injunction blocking certification of the referendum holds. And the emergency petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, addressed to the wrong court, riddled with spelling errors, and built on a procedurally defective constitutional amendment, sits in legal limbo.

Democrats in Virginia bet heavily that they could rewrite the rules fast enough to lock in a near-total congressional advantage before anyone could stop them. The courts stopped them. The filings suggest the legal team behind the effort was not ready for the fight it picked.

The open questions are straightforward: Will the U.S. Supreme Court even agree to hear the case? And if it does, will Virginia Democrats manage to address the filing to the right building?

When you cannot spell your own state's name, address your petition to the correct court, or follow your own constitution's amendment process, the problem is not bad luck. It is bad judgment, the kind voters tend to remember.