Virginia Democrats' long-shot attempt to get the U.S. Supreme Court to instate their gerrymandered congressional map was quickly panned by legal experts who pointed out a basic error on the first page of the legal filing: They mislabeled the pleading.
The document describes the pleading as an "Emergency Application to the Supreme Court of Virginia." Legal experts such as Ethics and Public Policy Center senior fellow Ed Whelan said that styling "makes no sense" and should likely be addressed to the Supreme Court of the United States. Honest Elections Project vice president Chad Ennis went a step further and said Democrats have become "unhinged."
"The proponents of the VA redistricting plan have become unhinged following their easily foreseeable loss in the VA Supreme Court," Ennis told the Washington Free Beacon. "Their court filings since the ruling are even further divorced from the law. When you write with all emotion and no legal grounding, you make mistakes."
The Virginia attorney general's office declined to comment.
The emergency application came days after Virginia's justices ruled 4-3 to toss a proposed constitutional amendment that would have allowed Democrats to redraw the state's congressional districts with a 10-1 advantage mere months before the midterm elections. Democrats quickly flew into a tailspin, with some floating a tenuous plan to replace the entire state supreme court with justices who would rule in their favor, the New York Times reported.
Legal experts also scrutinized the validity of arguments that Virginia attorney general Jay Jones, Virginia solicitor general Tillman Breckenridge, and their out-of-state counsel offered in their challenge before the U.S. Supreme Court, which typically defers to states to interpret their own laws. Whelan called their petition "a crazy filing." He questioned their decision to invoke federal law and their argument that the Supreme Court of Virginia grossly overreached in its decision.
"But no justice is going to find the court's ruling manifestly bonkers," he posted to X. "Look for this stay application to be denied without any dissent."
Former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli said Democrats' "incompetence has been legion" and questioned why they brought in an out-of-state lawyer to argue Virginia's constitution.
"It's not like that resulted in a good performance, and you have a pretty poor first high profile public performance by our new state Attorney General here in Virginia," Cuccinelli, who now heads the Election Transparency Initiative, told the Free Beacon.
Others pointed out that an earlier filing misspelled "Virginia" and "senator."
