SELLERS: Leftists use insane logic to claim blue tsunami justifies more gerrymandering

Having taken over traditionally red states — including Texas, North Carolina and Georgia — which were at the center of this year’s tit-for-tat standoff over gerrymandering, leftists and their media allies wasted no time using a massive electoral landslide Tuesday to try to justify why they needed to cheat more.

“We made clear last year, when this corrupt effort to rig the midterm elections by gerrymandering congressional maps in red states all across the country began, that Republicans might start this redistricting and gerrymandering battle. Democrats were going to finish it,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a victory-lap speech Wednesday.

Jeffries, who is poised to be the next House Speaker, may have been signaling that he planned to do precisely what Democrats previously claimed would be an affront to democracy itself, even as the election outcome underscored that Republicans had not unfairly rigged voting districts to benefit themselves.

Readers will recall that the gerrymanderama reached peak insanity with Virginia’s attempt to pass a law that violated its own state constitution. A deceptively worded ballot referendum pushed by the Democrat-controlled General Assembly sought to force out all but one of Virginia's GOP congressional representatives in a state where the political divide is close to evenly split.

That, itself, followed years of largely successful lawfare battles waged by Obama wingman Eric Holder and DNC bagman Marc Elias to deploy a “sue till blue” strategy that used the courts to force redraws of GOP-drawn electoral maps.

Democrat Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger was a beneficiary of one such court-mandated redraw, which flipped Virginia’s 7th congressional district from one easily won by “tea party” conservative Dave Brat to a battleground district with a blue edge. The former CIA operative’s district has since passed to another deep-state plant, Rep. Yevgeny “Eugene” Vindman, whose brother Aleksandr was the eavesdropping NSA operative used by then-Rep. Adam Schiff to push the bogus Ukraine impeachment during the first Trump administration.

Through the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (which inherited Obama’s Organizing for Action campaign warchest and infrastructure) Holder spent the past decade identifying specific races and states he hoped to target with lawfare that would help optimize political outcomes in Democrats’ favor.

The NDRC even admitted as much on its tax documents.

With that operation as the backdrop, including several key legal battles that landed in the lap of the US Supreme Court, the Louisiana v. Callais case emerged in April, its landmark decision finally giving Republicans the legal justification needed to level the playing field.

In earlier cases, such as Cooper v. Harris (2017), the court reaffirmed its longtime stance that race-based gerrymandering violated the law, thereby requiring GOP-controlled legislatures to forfeit their constitutional authority to draw legislative maps and instead cede that power to activist judges.

However, in Louisiana v. Callais, the lower courts flouted this legal standard to rule the opposite, saying not only was it OK to demand that states apply racial gerrymandering to carve out blue districts in minority-heavy regions, but that doing so was mandated by the Voting Rights Act.

This led to wacky anti-civil-rights outcomes, such as the Memphis area district in Tennessee where Steve Cohen, a white Jewish Democrat, beat out black Republican woman Charlotte Bergmann in five separate election cycles.

Despite clear evidence that the underlying intent of the Voting Rights Act, to help enfranchise minorities in the post-Jim Crow era, no longer applied, leftists lashed out over the potential loss of automatic seats.

Governors such as Gavin Newsom in California, Kathy Hochul in New York, JD Pritzker in Illinois, and Spanberger in Virginia scrambled to shore up their already gerrymandered districts in blue-controlled states to offset any GOP gains in red ones.

But as Tuesday’s blue wave for Democrats revealed, it was a pointless exercise since the Republicans suffered major losses in once-safe red states across the board.

Some leftists gloated that the apparent GOP “dummymander” had undermined their the efforts to consolidate political influence by diluting it elsewhere.

But in reality, Republican governors like Greg Abbott in Texas, who stunningly lost his own reelection bid, were doing little more than shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic as voters rebuked the party in power for high gas and grocery costs.

That didn’t stop left-leaning media from claiming that, by overcome an electoral map that was supposed to be impossibly rigged against them, voters actually gave Democrats a mandate to wield their new legislative power to reverse the court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision.

Essentially, even though Democrats had no difficulty flipping red states without the extra advantages of specially carved-out districts, they plan to justify their gerrymandering power-grab by insisting they ought to be allowed to give themselves more political advantages because Republicans started it (they didn’t).

And of course, if the Supreme Court dares to overturn any Democrat gerrymandering legislation as unconstitutional, the leftist majority will use that as justification to pack the courts.

It’s gonna be a long two years.