The Supreme Court on Friday tossed out an emergency request from Virginia officials to reinstate a congressional map that would have benefited Democrats in this year’s midterm election, a widely expected decision that represented the court’s latest foray into a nationwide redistricting war.
The decision thwarts Democratic plans to use the new map to pick up as many as four additional seats in the House of Representatives this year.
The 6-3 conservative court has recently sided with Republicans in Louisiana and Alabama – permitting those states to quickly redraw their maps. But the Virginia case dealt more squarely with questions of state law rather than federal questions, and many experts predicted that the appeal was, at best, a Hail Mary.
There were no noted dissents. and the court did not explain its reasoning in the one-sentence order.
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, signaled this week that the state was abandoning the effort anyway, telling reporters on Wednesday that the state would move forward with the old maps regardless of how the US Supreme Court decided the emergency appeal.
