Democrats Try To Gaslight America After Redistricting Faceplant

Virginia Democrats are gaslighting the American public after losing big on their redistricting gamble by attempting to sell a big lie to save face.

Prominent Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are publicly complaining that because the Virginia Supreme Court issued its ruling — invalidating the newly-gerrymandered congressional map — after the referendum was over, the court should be under scrutiny for overturning the will of the people. What they are not saying is that Virginia Democrats demanded — in litigation filed with the court — that no ruling be issued until after the referendum was over.

“What is extremely disturbing about what has happened in Virginia is this court overturned the will of three million Virginians,” Ocasio-Cortez told reporters. While 3 million Virginians did vote on the referendum, only a little over half (1.6 million) voted in favor of the measure.

AOC: What is extremely disturbing about what has happened in Virginia is this court overturned the will of three million Virginians. They can say what they want about the ballot initiative, but they explicitly chose to issue this ruling after the election happened. They had all… pic.twitter.com/NC7kUsMikB

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 13, 2026

“They can say what they want about the ballot initiative, but they explicitly chose to issue this ruling after the election happened. They had all the time in the world to issue an opinion or an injunction before allowing this election to happen,” she continued. “They did not overturn a map — they overturned an election … It is the power of the American people that should be the ultimate check on all three branches.”

Adam Parkhomenko, who served as an adviser to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, amplified a Bluesky account making the same argument. That argument was that the court, in waiting until after the election, was making its ruling — and thus invalidating the new map — after gaining only one new piece of information: how the people would vote on the issue.

“The best argument re: Virginia decision I’ve heard is this,” he said.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) issued a statement immediately after the ruling, trashing the Virginia Supreme Court for overturning the will of the people.

The decision by the Virginia Supreme Court to overturn the will of more than three million voters will not stand. pic.twitter.com/ZtayVJRw4T

— Hakeem Jeffries (@RepJeffries) May 8, 2026

But as Justice D. Arthur Kelsey wrote in his May 8 opinion, the delay had been the Democrats’ idea. In fact, they had presented several legal arguments in favor of it, citing precedent and saying that the court could not lawfully rule on the validity of the measure until it was adopted.

“It is fair to ask whether we could have or should have reviewed the constitutionality of the proposed amendment prior to it being presented to the voters,” Kelsey wrote. “Throughout this litigation, the Commonwealth has insisted that we cannot lawfully decide this case prior to the referendum. In its motion for a stay in this case, the Commonwealth argued that longstanding Virginia precedent, Scott v. James, was ‘virtually indistinguishable’ from this case and that it clearly held that ‘courts cannot interfere to stop any of the proceedings while this permanent law is in the process of being made,’ and ‘[o]nly ‘upon the completion of the proceedings, [if] the validity of the amendment is assailed[] on the ground that the several provisions of the Constitution have not been complied with, then the courts can pass upon the validity of the amendment.'”

Kelsey also made it clear that the court was well aware that Democrats would attempt to turn the argument back on itself if they did not get their way, adding, “Having successfully insisted (over the objection of the Claimants)13 that we postpone judicial review of the constitutional amendment until after the election process, it might be tempting for the Commonwealth to think that the final vote implicitly stacks the deck in its favor — perhaps enough so that the exercise of any judicial review could be viewed as an ultra vires effort to overturn the will of the people.”

He concluded that Democrats were essentially attempting to set up a situation in which precedent prohibited the court from ruling before the referendum passed and “the will of the people” barred the court from ruling afterward — thus nullifying the court’s ability to act at all.

And Democrats like Ocasio-Cortez are quickly proving him right.