A Terrible Omen
Democrats just chose not to respond to an element of a Republican coup d'etat.
I don’t think it will happen.
But there’s at least some chance Democrats will “win” millions more votes than Republicans in House elections this November, but fail to gain a majority by the margin of Republican gerrymandering.
And if it does happen, history books will treat the events of May 2026 much differently than our political establishment did in real time. Historians will see a mask-off moment when Republican-appointed judges at all levels revealed their partisan will to power. The moment when the weathered artifice of our supposedly non-political judiciary crumbled, revealing the courts to have been captured in an Orban-esque manner all along.
They will also note, if this story holds, that Democrats decided to take it lying down.
In my previous piece, I argued Republican judges had picked a side in Donald Trump’s effort to rig the midterms. This piece is about the horrible omen of Democrats choosing to surrender.
“Wiping out the entire supreme court is an incredibly extreme step to take over a decision you don’t like,” Virginia’s state senate majority leader Scott Surovell told the New Republic’s Greg Sargent, as if a high court working to entrench a dictatorial regime is just like any old court issuing ordinary decisions, some bad, some good.
If this decision holds, Democrats will have once again chosen not to escalate a partisan fight—the most critical fight since Trump’s election—in favor of throwing all their eggs in the basket of electoralism. Standing athwart evil seems unpleasant, so we’ll have citizens do it for us. We’ll redouble our efforts to beat these cheaters at the ballot box. What could go wrong? We’ll simply pander to voters a bit harder, count on turnout, along with Trump’s unpopularity, to salvage the midterms for us, and fix things in January.
And of course it could work.
Trump is incredibly unpopular. Some of the districts Republicans have tried to steal are poorly drawn to withstand a Democratic wave election. Democrats are, on paper, still favored to win control of the House, and, from there, can resume the redistricting arms race. Make Republicans pay for their bad acting in 2028.
But we shouldn’t try to unsee what we’ve just seen. There’s an element of yada yada yada here, where we assume that a Republican judiciary that just picked a side in a political redistricting fight won’t pick the same side when Republicans ask them to steal House control more directly—by blocking certifications, or allowing ballots to be canceled, or upholding Republican efforts to disqualify Democrats who win majority-minority districts.
Virginia Democrats have little time left to escalate their fight as they should. But if they don’t even try, we need to read that as a bearish indicator of how hard the party will fight for a majority won fair-and-square, when state courts and the U.S. Supreme Court intervene to help Trump steal the legislature.
Democrats have taken too much solace in the fact that Republican judges didn’t go along with Trump’s coup attempt in 2020.
They read the guardrails holding in that instance to reflect the integrity Republican jurists. These judges may be ideological, even partisan in some instances, but they have lines they won’t cross, principles they won’t compromise for the purposes of maximizing right-wing power.
That is an over-read.