William Campenni is our old friend from the Rathergate days. He served in the Texas Air National Guard with George W. Bush and knew the 60 Minutes story was a fraud from the outset. We have turned to him on many occasions since then (compiled here). Today he has joined us to explain what Democrats are up to in Virginia. Bill writes:
* * * * *
Elbridge Gerry was an amateur.
Gerry, a man who should be memorialized for a portfolio of accomplishments – a Vice President, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a successful merchant, an architect of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, a congressman, and a governor – is instead remembered as the miscreant namesake of a rigged political map into a salamander-shaped monstrosity now disparaged as a Gerrymander.
Again, Gerry was an amateur. His opus was a single small state senatorial district in the Boston suburbs. If you wanted to play in the major leagues of gerrymandering, you have to come to Virginia and join the Democrats in their attempt to remap Virginia’s eleven congressional districts.
A quick backgrounder and lesson for those who live in the other states. As recently as 2004, Virginia was a solid red bastion. Bush carried it by a landslide margin of 8 percent and the Republicans got 71 percent of the vote to win 8 of the 11 congressional districts. Both Senators were Republican.
But the winds of change were already flowing, often helped by establishment Republican connivance and apathy. In the suburbs around Washington, illegal immigrants were being welcomed by the Chamber of Commerce crowd and the cheap-labor RINO class to provide low-pay workers for the burgeoning growth taking place there. Adding to the influx was a large number of legal (green card) immigrants from South Asia to support the high-tech industries setting up in those Virginia suburbs. (The electoral propensities of these non-citizens is a topic for another discussion, but they do vote.) Adding to the immigrant waves was a huge expansion of government jobs, workers, and government contractors during the Obama and Biden eras.
Of course, the Democrats could not believe their good fortune. Eventually but inexorably, northern Virginia, specifically the counties of Fairfax and Arlington, and the city of Alexandria — In Virginia, cities are legally separate jurisdictions not in any county — slid over to the Democrat column. Once there on the blue side of the political divide, the Democrat-ruled northern Virginia urban complex, like Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, New York in their states, became the gorilla that was able to flip state-wide elections to the Democrat column. They even learned to use the tried-and-true Democrat toolkit, with new laws allowing mail-in ballots, same day registrations, unpurged poll books, lax vetting of registrations, vote counts long after election day, favorable rulings by Democrat judges, and so on.
Now the Democrats are firmly ensconced and determined that the current six Democrat, five Republican districts become ten Democrat. They have conceived a map that would make Elbridge Gerry envious. Elkanah Tisdale, the unknown Boston artist who created the original Gerrymander, would have no problem creating a zoo of griffins and gargoyles out of the contorted new districts, illustrated in this map:
(Virginia Democrats release long-awaited 10–1 congressional map • Virginia Mercury)
Among its many perversions, one county — Fairfax, in the Washington suburbs — would have five representatives. That’s right, FIVE representatives for one county, an octopoid-like (pentapoid?) creature headed in Fairfax with tentacles reaching out almost 200 miles. With its population, and the state and federal Democrat political center of gravity and power structure already in Fairfax, it is likely, even probable, that all five democrat representatives, almost half the state delegation, would reside in Fairfax County, across the river from Washington.
With the Iran War, the travails in Minnesota, the Mandami chronicles, and a government shutdown, congressional redistricting and gerrymandering in Virginia have not been much on the national radar screen. But those of us in Virginia are having an interesting debate on redistricting as once solid red Virginia continues its decline into a permanent blue political Hades striving to become East California or Southeast Minnesota.
At issue is a special election called by Democrats for April 21 (including a 45-day early vote already in progress) that would allow the Democrats who completely control all branches of government to toss aside the Commonwealth Constitution and change the 6-5 democrat advantage to a 10-1 dominance of congressional districts. They have poured in vast resources to rig the election to their desired outcome. Wads of out-of-state money are outspending the NO vote by 10-to-1. They have brought in their heavy hitters, like Barack Hussein Obama, to saturate the airwaves with deceitfully crafted messages, like “restore fairness,” “stop Trump,” “temporary fix” and “restore balance” (with a 10-1 delegation ignoring the Republicans who are always 45-53 percent of the vote).
While one might expect Republicans to be chagrined and desolate over these proceedings, the downstate Democrats seemingly pleased by their Fairfax-headed Hydra might soon realize they will be represented by far-away Democrat socialists having little in common with their own more moderate politics and loyalty to American laws, culture, and traditional values.
With modern technical tools and some commonsense legislative reforms (okay, that’s an oxymoron), honest redistricting can take place, redistricting that keeps like-minded geographic areas and electorates together to fight for their unique issues and desires. Is there not irony in the fact that Democrats want to do away with the Electoral College because they say the winner-take-all process disenfranchises the 45 percent minorities, but has no problem having a Congress where gerrymandering can achieve a similar disenfranchisement of a state’s 45 percent minority?
We’ll soon see how the Commonwealth of Virginia’s gerrymandering plays in this upcoming election. But there is a cautionary, even existential aspect to this event. As Lincoln noted in his Gettysburg Address, we were then engaged in a Great Civil War to determine if a nation conceived in the novel concept of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, can long endure. Gerrymandering, by whatever party, wants to deny the people their government and turn it over to a political elite that picks their voters rather than faces them. Can that nation long endure?
