Virginia Democrats trying to salvage their redistricting push apparently addressed their emergency appeal to the wrong Supreme Court, and misspelled both their state's name and the word "Senator" in the same document, drawing pointed ridicule from the commonwealth's former attorney general.
Former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, a Republican, shared an image of the filing on social media Tuesday and noted that the emergency application intended for the Supreme Court of the United States was instead emblazoned with an address "to the Supreme Court of Virginia." That was an improvement, Miyares observed, over the Democrats' previous filing, in which they had spelled the state "Virgnia" and written "Sentator" instead of "Senator."
The blunders capped a week that had already gone badly for Democrats in Virginia. Late last week, the state's highest court struck down a set of new congressional maps that would have eliminated as many as four Republican-leaning districts, ruling that Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger improperly fast-tracked a constitutional amendment to undo the state's prohibitions on partisan gerrymandering. Now, as Democrats scramble to get the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, even their paperwork is working against them.
Miyares, who led the online criticism Tuesday, did not hold back. As Fox News Digital reported, the former AG posted a three-word assessment of the Democrats' progress from one filing to the next:
"Good news: Dems managed to spell Virginia correctly. Bad news: They sent their emergency application to SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) to the wrong court."
He added a two-word verdict: "Baby steps."
The filing errors may seem like minor embarrassments. But they land in the middle of a high-stakes legal fight in which Virginia Democrats are asking the nation's highest court to overrule a state court on state constitutional procedure, a heavy lift under any circumstances. Sloppy paperwork does not help the credibility of a petition that argues the Virginia Supreme Court "impermissibly transgressed the ordinary bounds of judicial review."
The underlying dispute centers on how Democrats got their redistricting referendum onto the ballot. Virginia's constitution requires that any amendment receive approval from two separate sessions of the state legislature, with those sessions "decisively separated by an election." By the time the redistricting referendum reached consideration in the General Assembly last year, early voting for 2025 had already begun.
The Virginia Supreme Court concluded that the amendment's consideration had not been meaningfully separated by a full election cycle. The court struck down the new maps, maps designed, by most accounts, to overwhelmingly favor Democrats in the upcoming November midterm elections.
The stakes were enormous. The New York Post reported that the referendum passed narrowly, 51.6% to 48.4%, and could have enabled Democrats to redraw districts in a way that might have shifted Virginia's congressional delegation from 6-5 to as much as 10-1 in their favor. Republican lawyer Thomas McCarthy argued during oral arguments that voters deserved more time to understand what they were approving.
"There are lots of voters across the Commonwealth who are not totally educated on everything going on in Richmond, and they need time. The Commonwealth needs time for the whole thing to be aired out."
Justices who spoke during oral arguments largely pressed Democrats' lawyer on the procedural problems, while being generally less confrontational with the Republican side, a dynamic that foreshadowed the ruling.
Fox News Digital referenced a related headline describing the episode as "Virginia Democrats' $70M redistricting gamble" that "backfires after court defeat, ignites blame game." That figure underscores the scale of the Democratic investment in a strategy that now lies in legal rubble.
The ruling is another headache for Gov. Spanberger, who staked political capital on the redistricting effort. She has not been quoted publicly responding to the filing errors. Democrats' argument going forward rests on the claim that the Virginia Supreme Court overstepped its authority, but persuading the U.S. Supreme Court to wade into a state constitutional procedure question is a steep climb, particularly when the state court's reasoning turned on straightforward textual requirements about legislative sessions and elections.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has publicly expressed confidence that Democrats will still flip the House, even after the Virginia setback. That confidence may be tested. As we previously reported, Jeffries vowed to fight the Virginia Supreme Court ruling, but vowing and winning are different things.
Virginia is not the only state where the legal and political landscape has shifted against Democrats on redistricting. The Supreme Court recently cleared Alabama to redraw its congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterms, a move that threatens two Democratic seats.
And the fallout from the Virginia ruling has not been limited to courtrooms. Some on the left reacted to the decision with rhetoric that went far beyond normal political disappointment, as one leftist streamer floated the idea of violent revolution in response to the court's ruling.
Meanwhile, Jeffries faces fractures within his own caucus. On an unrelated front, three House Democrats recently broke ranks to vote with Republicans on funding for DHS and immigration enforcement, a sign that the minority leader's grip on his conference is not as firm as his public statements suggest.
The pattern is hard to miss. When the rules produce results Democrats don't like, the instinct is to change the rules, whether that means fast-tracking a constitutional amendment, filing emergency appeals to the highest court in the land, or, as in one California Democrat's recent petition, trying to scrap an entire primary system because Republicans are winning under it.
It remains unclear when, or whether, the U.S. Supreme Court will take up the Virginia redistricting case. The emergency petition, addressed to the wrong court and riddled with typos, still needs to clear basic procedural hurdles before justices even consider the merits.
Virginia Democrats are asking the federal judiciary to rescue a strategy that their own state's highest court found violated the plain requirements of the Virginia constitution. The procedural shortcut, pushing a constitutional amendment through without a proper election separating the two required legislative votes, was not a technicality. It was the whole point. Democrats needed speed because the midterms were approaching, and they needed the maps redrawn before voters went to the polls.
The Virginia Supreme Court said no. The question now is whether nine justices in Washington will say otherwise, and whether they'll take seriously a petition that couldn't even get the court's name right on the cover page.
If you can't address the envelope correctly, maybe the problem isn't the court that rejected your case. Maybe it's the case itself.