Hey, Virginians: Your ballot will ask you if you support a constitutional amendment to create a bipartisan redistricting committee. I strongly recommend voting “yes” on that. It’s a *huge* improvement over our current process.

The objection you will hear to the Virginia redistricting amendment is “this is bipartisan redistricting, which is not as good as nonpartisan redistricting.” Yes, that is true! But it’s madness to keep a bad system instead of moving to an improved one (on the way to a great one).

Many Democrats in the Virginia General Assembly oppose the redistricting amendment (they supported it when they were in the minority), saying “let’s wait and pass a better one in a few years.”

What most of these people are really saying is “look, just let us gerrymander first.”

As St. Augustine prayed, “Grant me chastity and self-control…but not yet.”

Probably 15 years ago, I hosted an event with the top Virginia House Democrat as the speaker. He delivered impassioned remarks about how we need redistricting reform. I asked him if he’d feel differently if Democrats ran the House. He said then he’d oppose reform.

Here we are.

It’s amazing watching prominent Democrats try to kill the decade-old, hard-fought, Democrat-led push for redistricting reform. Literally the same legislators who voted for this twice are now saying “gosh, I don’t know.”

I wish they’d be honest and say “I wanna do a gerrymander.”

The hard part about redistricting reform is it it requires the majority party to willingly give up power.

The one way out is if it’s unclear in the ~6th year of the decade who will control the legislature in 5 years, after the next census. Only then can change happen.

So when a member of the majority party says, mere months before redistricting, “never mind our years-long effort to move to non-partisan redistricting, it was…uh…a bad idea…because…reasons,” they’re either lying to you or they’re lying to themselves.

Majority parties oppose redistricting reform. It’s what they do, always, every time. If that party happens to be *your* party, you have to ignore their siren song.

Virginians, lash yourself to the mast and vote “yes” on constitutional amendment #1.