The Virginia Supreme Court struck down a rushed amendment after finding the legislature ignored constitutional procedures, and Democratic leaders reacted by considering extreme political fixes and public outrage rather than accepting the court’s ruling.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries spent a private call with House Democrats discussing a plan to remove the entire Virginia Supreme Court by lowering mandatory judicial retirement to 54 and replacing all seven justices with party appointees. That extreme response followed a 4-3 decision in McDougle v. Scott that the Democratic legislature failed to follow the state constitution when it advanced a redistricting amendment. Jeffries called it “unprecedented in American history.”
The court found the legislature passed the amendment in a way that didn’t give voters proper notice — the first legislative passage came on October 31, 2025, while early voting had been underway for six weeks. About 1.3 million Virginians had already voted and could not have considered a change that did not yet exist. The map showed stark distortion: roughly 47% of Virginians who voted Republican would be left with 9% of seats, while 51% who voted Democratic would get 91% of seats, and the amendment passed by 1.69% of the vote.
The decision rested on basic process. The majority wrote, “The Rule of Law,” the majority wrote, “requires that it be done the right way.” The court concluded the legislature could not dodge constitutional safeguards simply because a bare majority of votes later approved the referendum. The message was that procedure matters, even when outcomes favor one party.
Democrats had litigated that the court should not act before the vote, citing long-standing precedent, and the Virginia Supreme Court paused review at their request. After the referendum succeeded, Democrats shifted and argued the vote settled the matter. The court rejected that maneuver and warned against a rule where both pre-election and post-election review would be barred, writing, “Having successfully insisted that we postpone judicial review of the constitutional amendment until after the election process,” the majority wrote, “it might be tempting for the Commonwealth to think that the final vote implicitly stacks the deck in its favor.”
The opinion even quoted the party’s own counsel during oral argument, when Justice Arthur Kelsey asked, “But the fact that there is a yes vote doesn’t tell us anything about those merits?” Counsel answered: “No. It does not.” Two days later the same party argued the opposite, and the flip-flop undercut their courtroom position. That inconsistency is why the court enforced the procedures it was asked to respect.
That factual record undermines the current talking point that an unelected court somehow overturned an election. Senator Tim Kaine said, “if the Virginia Supreme Court had legitimate concerns about this referendum, the time to stop it would have been before three million Virginians cast their ballots.” Critics responded bluntly that Kaine’s party had asked the court to wait; as one observer put it, Kaine “either never read the opinion or sought to mislead voters.”
The court also framed who was truly disenfranchised: the 1.3 million early voters who cast ballots before the first legislative passage and did so without the amendment in view. The court found those voters had their “constitutionally protected opportunity” compromised by a process that allowed a constitutional change to be ratified with effectively zero prior notice.
This episode fits a pattern of political pressure on courts when rulings go the wrong way for one party. In 2020, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer warned justices by name: “I want to tell you Gorsuch. I want to tell you Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” That kind of rhetoric corrodes public confidence and invites retaliatory schemes.
Even activist commentary has urged radical steps: a column argued “It’s Time to Accept that the US Supreme Court is Illegitimate and Must be Replaced.” Public strategists have been blunt too; James Carville instructed: “Don’t run on it. Don’t talk about it. Just do it.” Those lines reveal an appetite to change institutions when policy fights are lost at the ballot or in court.
Republicans point out the irony that the party that warned about executive defiance of courts now discusses wiping out a court because it applied the constitution. The Trump administration’s handling of judicial orders and appeals, including emergency review and a Supreme Court victory in Trump v. J.G.G., shows the system works when parties litigate and seek higher review instead of political retribution.
A functioning republic depends on judges and legislatures following rules, not on winners rewriting the rules to cement victory. The Virginia case tested that idea: the court paused, reviewed, and enforced procedural requirements designed to protect voters’ rights to informed choice. The result was a rare and uncomfortable rebuke to partisan maneuvering.
The response from Democratic leaders — from public denunciations to legislative ideas that would scrub an entire bench — reveals the stakes of losing a single state ruling. It also lays bare a dangerous preference for power over process: if courts only count when they help you, courts become tools, not neutral referees. That is a hard line to defend in a system built on equal application of law.
The Virginia Supreme Court faced a difficult case and declined to yield to political pressure. It enforced a constitutional rule designed to protect voters and preserve meaningful judicial review, even as partisan actors demanded otherwise. The choice to uphold procedure rather than expediency is what the institution is supposed to do.
