It could very well be that the embarrassing spelling and clerical errors Virginia’s attorney general’s office has made in the legal battle over redistricting are due to incompetence. Attorney General Jay Jones is a man who has wished for the children of his political opponents to be killed, and such venality never correlates strongly with fitness for office.
But incompetence, as always, is the kind explanation. When the late and sorely missed Charles Krauthammer issued his Krauthammer Razor — “In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit” — he was exonerating guilty parties.
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This time, it is likely neither cunning nor conspiracy. More forebodingly, what the mistakes may betray is desperation, which often leads to rash and erratic behavior. Virginia’s leadership, and in fact the national Democratic Party structure, has gone ballistic over the redistricting war, threatening to blow up the state and national Constitutions if they don’t get what they want.
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When you go ballistic, though, you tend to misfire. A nation already on the edge after the assassinations or attempted assassinations of political figures, and the casual support for political violence that Jones’s wishes attest to, can absorb only so much political drama. It is best not to test its limits.
The mistakes themselves were humiliating for the government of Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), already reeling after the state’s Supreme Court declared last Friday that the referendum the Old Dominion held on April 21 on a new redistricting map was unconstitutional.
The redrawn maps the court threw out would likely have given Democrats 10 out of the state’s 11 congressional seats. The Virginia court, however, ruled that the state would have to use the old maps, which rendered six seats for Democrats and five for Republicans during the 2024 elections.
Within hours, Jones petitioned the state court to delay the order that struck down the referendum, in a joint motion filed alongside Virginia House Speaker Don Scott and state Sen. Louise Lucas. The first page, however, contained two glaring errors, misspelling the state as “Virgnia” and the title for defendant Ryan McDougle as “Sentator.”
This led immediately to mockery online, with Jones’s predecessor Jason Miyares posting on X, “First, if you are going to appeal to SCOTUS maybe don’t misspell Virginia????” He was referring to the fact that Jones and the others were asking the state court to delay implementation as they appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
But it was Miyares’s second point that was most damning. The adequate and independent state grounds doctrine “limits the U.S. Supreme Court’s jurisdiction to review decisions from state courts.” The motion by Jones, Scott, and Lucas, therefore, “has zero chance to succeed and … will be declared dead on arrival.”
Anything can happen, of course. But the motion, in itself, looks like a rash, Hail Mary pass with time expiring on the clock.
But Jones’s office wasn’t done making clumsy errors. When it got around to filing the emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking it to overturn the state court’s decision, they made sure the words were spelled correctly. They forgot, however, to change templates on the cover page. It erroneously read that it was “an emergency application to the Supreme Court of Virginia.”
Again, online wags had a field day at the expense of Jones and his band of desperados.
But erratic misfires born of desperation may be less of a laughing matter if they start to grow out of proportion and involve more weighty issues.
Several outlets have reported that the House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D–NY) and other top Democrats discussed on a private call on Saturday lowering the mandatory retirement age for the Virginia Supreme Court from 75 to 54, which just happens to be the age of the present court’s youngest member.
Democrats controlling the General Assembly in Richmond would then have a free hand to appoint a clean slate of new justices, who would then turn around and invalidate the May 8 decision and reinstate the redrawn maps.
If this sounds reckless, Jeffries and others have become more serious about their intent to pack the nation’s Supreme Court the first time they get a chance, appointing enough new justices to invalidate the current 6-3 conservative majority. Jeffries has called the Supreme Court “illegitimate,” leading President Donald Trump to denounce him on Instagram.
Trump’s critics may be starting to believe their own dangerous rhetoric, that the president is a threat to democracy — “smoking their own supply,” as it’s called on the street — and have decided to win in November at any cost.
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At some point, cooler heads will have to prevail before we continue to spiral. Can Spanberger be relied upon to be that cooler head? Nothing in her record says she can. She stuck by Jones after his sickening comments on little children were revealed, and then moved to gerrymander her state after promising on the campaign trail not to do so.
Krauthammer’s Razor, thus, will not exonerate her. The former CIA case officer is probably both cunning and conspiratorial, not what we need to pull us back from the brink.
