Category Archives: rights

Another Progressive-Democratic Party Disregard for Law

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The Virginia Progressive-Democratic Party-dominated State legislature tried to amend the State’s constitution to redistrict itself from a 6-5 majority in its Representative delegation to the Federal House of Representatives to a 9-1 majority. The proposed amendment was originally passed four days prior to its State-wide elections for its State government, and the new legislature, on taking office the next January, repassed the proposed amendment, supposedly as constitutionally required. The referendum then passed, narrowly, in the State’s voter referendum on the amendment.

Virginia’s Supreme Court, though, struck the amendment as unconstitutionally enacted, violating as it did the State constitution’s Article XII, Section 1; ruled the subsequent referendum irreparably tainted by that violation; and invalidated that referendum. The outcome is that the State’s prior districting, with its 6-5 Progressive-Democrat-majority of districts, remains in effect for the coming 2026 elections and the primaries beforehand.

The Court’s ruling gave a detailed, multi-page explanation of the constitutional failure, but their explanation boils down to this bit from the ruling:

In this case, voting in the general election for the House of Delegates began on September 19, 2025, and ended on Election Day, November 4, 2025. The General Assembly voted for the first time to propose the constitutional amendment to the electorate on October 31, 2025. By that date, over 1.3 million votes had been cast in the general election, which was approximately 40% of the total vote for that election cycle.

The Court also took note of the State’s argument regarding those 1.3 million voters which was centered on the premise that it was too bad to be them, so sad. The Court waved the BS flag at that argument, and it did so in gruesome (for the State’s arguers) detail.

The Progressive-Democrats making that tough luck argument while overtly disregarding the plain text of their own State’s constitution is a clear and present demonstration of Party’s utter disregard for any law or constitutional requirement that is inconvenient to their push for power.

The Virginia State Supreme Court ruling can be read here.

Primary Elections and Redistricting

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With the Supreme Court’s ruling on Louisiana v Callais et al. many more States are looking hard at redoing their district maps, ostensibly to eliminate Voting Rights Act-centered racial gerrymandering, and to enhance (Republican) partisan gerrymandering.

For good or ill (ill, I say), the current potential move very strongly emphasizes partisan gerrymandering. In the way, though, is the fact that many of the States looking here have already begun mail-in balloting for their primaries, or have completed their primary elections.

That’s an impediment, but I don’t see it as an impassable barrier. Primary elections are not final elections; those don’t occur until well after the political parties have made their nominations. Following those party decisions, the nominees will have months during which to campaign before the actual elections occur.

The dispositive factor, it seems to me, is that primary elections are strictly party-run elections; they are not bound by the laws for district/State/nation-wide elections. These party-run elections are conducted under party rules, albeit within overarching, generalized State criteria. Indeed, most jurisdictions limit primary election voting to members of the particular party fielding its own prospective candidate list. The general voting public isn’t involved in most of these jurisdictions.

That suggests to me that it’s a straightforward matter to cancel primaries in progress (as Louisiana is doing with its upcoming primary season), declare null completed primaries, and (re)hold them after a State’s redistricting effort is complete or has legislatively failed.

In Which I Agree with Michelle Obama and Angel Reese

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But maybe not for their reasons. In an interview on Obama’s podcast, WNBA star Angel Reese said,

The media has not always been great for me. And I’ll take a fine. I’ll catch a fine, especially in a WNBA. I’ll have a fine before I have to go to media and feel like my back is against the wall[.]

Obama repeatedly agreed with Reese over these and similar comments during the interview.

I tend to be hard over on the 1st Amendment and our freedoms of speech and association. It’s wrong that the WNBA and the other professional sports leagues require players and managers/coaches to present themselves to press inquisitions before, during, and after games. Athletes and their coaches and managers shouldn’t lose those basic rights just because of who they are.

Those rights to speak or not and to associate with pressmen formally or informally or not at all are independent of whether the press treats those it summons to their audiences badly or fawningly. Meeting the press should be an entirely voluntary affair. Nobody makes pressmen show up for these; neither should anyone else be required.

That’s the Point of the Escort

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The DC Circuit court has upheld Pentagon press reporter escort restrictions inside the Pentagon while the underlying case works its way through the judicial system.

Judge J Michelle Childs dissented, and in her dissent, she demonstrated her lack of understanding of the problem:

Reporters can hardly verify sources, gather information, or speak candidly with Department personnel with an escort looming over their shoulders.

Nor should those Department personnel be able to speak “candidly.” They’re possessed of too much classified information, and that information is classified for very good reasons. Passing that information to reporters, whether deliberately or accidentally, would do damage to our national security, potentially very severe damage.

Aside from that, we—and she—have no reason to believe the reporters are verifying any sources, since those reporters refuse to identify any of them.

These personnel have no business talking to reporters inside the Pentagon, anyway; they should be referring the reporter to the relevant Public Affairs Officer, who is well-trained in answering reporters’ questions as candidly as classification limits allow, as well as obfuscating and weasel-wording in response to a reporter’s obvious gotcha and trolling questions.

Dangerously Naïve Assumption

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Matthew Continetti, in his Free Expression piece, had this early on:

Yet Democrats are looking at the wrong maps. They’re winning the gerrymander battle while losing the larger war for America’s future. Their state machines produce Democratic victories, but from a shrinking base. Their populations are fleeing high taxes and housing shortages for Republican strongholds. Nor are Democrats prepared for 2030, when the decennial census will realign national politics toward the GOP-friendly South.

As Continetti noted,

House Minority Leader Congressman Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) threatened retaliation and summed up his party’s philosophy: “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

But he missed the implications of that, and that miss falsifies his underlying assumption that the Census Bureau count and subsequent House Representatives reallocation will occur in the normal fashion. That’s a dangerous miss, but he’s not alone in making that naïve assumption. No one in the press is thinking about the effect on the Census Bureau of Progressive-Democratic Party victories in the next two elections.

When the Progressive-Democrats gain control of the House and possibly the Senate after the 2026 elections, retain House control and retain or gain the majority in the Senate while winning the White House in the 2028 elections, this is what Party will do. First, it will use its Senate majority, possibly as early as January 2027, to gain outright control of the Senate by eliminating the filibuster altogether. That’ll be bad enough, devolving us from the liberty-preserving republican democracy of our present government structure to the tyranny of popular democracy.

Next, they’ll rescind any requirement for voters to show ID in order to vote, and they’ll lift restrictions on who is allowed to cross our border and under what conditions. To prevent States like Texas from doing their own border enforcement, they’ll pack the Supreme Court in order to get the judicial rulings they want regarding immigration and voting rights.

Finally, they’ll use all of that to cement for generations Party control over the popular democracy they will have created: they’ll alter the rules of counting the Census Bureau is required to use to prevent just that Representative reallocation in order create and preserve their Electoral College advantage.

There’s one more step that will put a big, blue bow on it. Many of the Progressive-Democratic Party-run States are making agreements among themselves to have each State award its Electoral College votes to the Presidential candidate that wins the national-level popular vote. Interstate agreements or compacts are illegal without explicit Congressional approval of each agreement or compact attempted, per our Constitution’s Art I, Sect 10, Clause 3. The Party-run Congress will promptly approve those agreements.

Our nation faces nation-defining elections in 2026 and 2028. The futures of our children and grandchildren and their children and grandchildren depend on the outcomes of those elections.