Hakeem Jeffries spent Saturday afternoon on a private call with House Democrats, talking about how to remove the entire Virginia Supreme Court. The plan: lower the state's mandatory judicial retirement age to 54, the age of the youngest sitting justice, and force every member off the bench. Replace all seven justices with Democratic appointees. Reverse Friday's ruling. Reinstate the map.

The New York Times has the call. The proposal came from a Michigan State University law professor in a progressive newsletter the night before. The House Minority Leader of the United States Congress, a man one election away from being Speaker, was taking it seriously enough to call lawyers about it.

That is the Democratic response to losing one state court ruling.

What the court actually decided

The ruling came down Friday: 4-3, in McDougle v. Scott. The Virginia Supreme Court held that the Democratic legislature had skipped the rules for changing the state constitution. The legislature passed the amendment for the first time on October 31, 2025. Early voting for the November elections had been running for six weeks. About 1.3 million Virginians had already voted, with no chance to factor in an amendment that did not yet exist.

The map the amendment would have built was striking on its face. The court ran the math from the Democrats' own filings. About 47% of Virginians who voted Republican in the last congressional election would now hold 9% of the state's congressional seats. About 51% who voted Democratic would hold 91%. The amendment passed by 1.69% of the total vote.

Half a state, in 9% of the seats, by a margin of less than two percent. That was the Democratic redistricting plan.

The court ruled that the legislature had to follow the constitution to do it. Democrats had not. "The Rule of Law," the majority wrote, "requires that it be done the right way."

Democrats Demanded the Delay. Now They Want The Opposite.

The talking point this weekend is that an unelected court overturned an election. Jeffries called it "unprecedented in American history." Senator Tim Kaine said the court should have stopped the referendum before three million Virginians cast ballots.

That is not what the record shows. The record shows the Virginia Democrats spent months telling the court that it could not rule until after the vote.

When Republicans first sued, before the referendum, Virginia Democrats went to the Virginia Supreme Court and asked it to halt the case. The Democrats' brief argued, citing a 1912 precedent called Scott v. James, that "courts cannot interfere to stop any of the proceedings while this permanent law is in the process of being made." The court agreed. It paused the lower court ruling that had gone against the Democrats. Over Republican objection, it waited for the people to vote.

Then the Democrats won the vote. Then they walked into oral argument and told the court that the vote had settled it.

The political logic was straightforward. Democrats knew the procedure was vulnerable. They calculated that the court would not strike down a successful referendum once the votes were counted, that the political cost of overturning the will of the people would outweigh the legal duty to enforce the constitution. It was a pressure play. The Virginia Supreme Court refused.

The opinion called this out directly. "Having successfully insisted that we postpone judicial review of the constitutional amendment until after the election process," the majority wrote, "it might be tempting for the Commonwealth to think that the final vote implicitly stacks the deck in its favor." If both moves worked at once, with pre-election review barred and post-election review barred, the court noted, "judicial review of allegedly unconstitutional procedures used to adopt a constitutional amendment would not exist in the Commonwealth of Virginia."

Footnote 14

The court has the Democrats' lawyer on the record.

In oral argument, Justice Arthur Kelsey asked the Democrats' counsel: "But the fact that there is a yes vote doesn't tell us anything about those merits?"

Counsel answered: "No. It does not."

That exchange is in footnote 14 of the opinion. The Commonwealth's own attorney, speaking for the Democratic legislature, told the court the vote did not matter. Two days later, Democrats began arguing the opposite.

Tim Kaine read the wrong opinion

Kaine put out a statement Friday: "if the Virginia Supreme Court had legitimate concerns about this referendum, the time to stop it would have been before three million Virginians cast their ballots." Kaine is a sitting U.S. senator and a former Democratic vice presidential nominee.

The court did not stop the vote because Kaine's own party demanded it not stop the vote. The opinion explains this and quotes the Democrats' own filings doing it. Jonathan Turley, who teaches constitutional law at George Washington University, put it cleanly: Kaine "either never read the opinion or sought to mislead voters."

Let's review the hard facts once more: the Democrats demanded the delay. The court granted the delay. The Democrats then said the delay barred the lawsuit. The court said it did not. Kaine is now bizarrely demanding the court explain a delay his own party engineered.

Who actually got disenfranchised

The opinion makes one more point. The Democrats' reading of "election" — only the single Tuesday in November counted — would have let the legislature pass a constitutional amendment one day before that Tuesday. Anyone who had voted early would have voted in the dark. The 1.3 million Virginians who had already voted in the 2025 elections were, in the court's words, voters whose "constitutionally protected opportunity" to weigh in on the amendment Democrats had treated as forfeited.

The Democratic complaint is that the court overruled three million voters. The court's answer is that Democrats had used state power to silence 1.3 million voters before the referendum even existed. The rule the legislature skipped exists so a voter can pick delegates with the proposed amendment in view. A reading that allows zero notice nullifies the safeguard.

The pattern

This is not new. It is the Democratic posture toward courts that rule the wrong way.

In March 2020, on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court at a pro-choice rally, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer addressed two of the justices by name. "I want to tell you Gorsuch. I want to tell you Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won't know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions." Chief Justice John Roberts called the threat "dangerous."

In 2021, President Biden empaneled a Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court to keep a promise to progressives who wanted the bench expanded. The commission's final report, written by a mixed panel of legal scholars, refused to endorse expansion. Even the body Biden picked would not give the activists what they wanted.

In December 2025, Harvard's Ryan Doerfler and Yale's Samuel Moyn published a column in The Guardian under the title: "It's Time to Accept that the US Supreme Court is Illegitimate and Must be Replaced."

Earlier this year, the Democratic strategist James Carville put it most plainly. On court packing, Carville told an interviewer: "Don't run on it. Don't talk about it. Just do it."

That is the through-line. The Virginia plan is not a one-off. It is the policy.

The projection

For four years, Democrats and a sympathetic press warned that Donald Trump would ignore court orders. The accusation became a constant theme of the second-term coverage: a coming constitutional crisis, a president who would defy injunctions, an administration that would not honor adverse rulings. Senator Adam Schiff used Senate floor speeches to warn of Trump's "blind eye to the rule of law." Senator Chris Murphy called the moment the most serious constitutional crisis since Watergate. The headlines on the left ran in the same key for months.

The most-cited test case came in March 2025, when Judge James Boasberg of the federal district court in Washington issued a temporary restraining order against the use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan nationals. Critics insisted the administration would ignore the order. The administration did not. It disputed the order, sought emergency review at the Supreme Court, and on April 7, 2025, in Trump v. J.G.G., the Supreme Court vacated Boasberg's TROs by a 5-4 vote and ordered the cases re-filed as habeas petitions in the districts holding the detainees. The administration won at the highest court in the country.

That is what the rule of law looks like in practice. Disagree with the lower court. Seek emergency review. Win at the Supreme Court. The system functioned as it was designed to function.

The party that spent four years accusing Trump of being ready to defy the courts is now proposing to defy them itself. Not by ignoring rulings, but by wiping the bench that issued them. The accusation was projection.

The principle

A court is not legitimate only when it rules your way. That is not a difficult principle. It is the basic precondition of having a court at all.

The Virginia Democrats spent six months telling the Virginia Supreme Court that the rule of law required it to wait. The court waited. The Democrats then told the court that the rule of law required it to honor the vote. The court answered that the same constitution that required the delay also required the procedure they had skipped. That is a court doing its job.

The same legal argument cannot be sacred when the court agrees with you and illegitimate when it does not. The institution does not change between Tuesday and Friday. The only thing that changes is which way the ruling goes.

This is what "fight back" looks like in the Democratic Party in 2026: lose a case you told the court could not be heard, deny the procedural history the court documented, accuse a sitting senator's home-state court of overturning an election it never tried to stop, and float a legislative scheme to wipe the entire bench. And above all else: insist that the rule of law applies to your opponents and not to you.

A democracy that picks its judges by the ruling never gets a ruling. It gets an outcome. The Virginia plan is the second thing.

The Virginia Supreme Court had a hard case before it with a hard question. It did not bow to the political pressure of the Democratic Party. It is an institution that upheld its part of the system, even if Democrats cannot comprehend that point anymore.