After a stunning loss at their state’s highest court, Virginia Democrats are desperately seeking new avenues to force their ultra-partisan redistricting measure on the Old Dominion — and plotting revenge against the judges who ruled against them.

In a 4-3 ruling late last week, the Virginia Supreme Court determined that the Democrat-controlled General Assembly’s legislation to create new congressional district maps violated the state’s constitution (Article XII, Section 1) and that the subsequent referendum on the matter was legally invalid. “This constitutional violation incurably taints the resulting referendum vote and nullifies its legal efficacy,” the court’s majority wrote. “In this case, the Commonwealth submitted a proposed constitutional amendment to Virginia voters in an unprecedented manner that violated the intervening-election requirement in Article XII, Section 1 of the Constitution of Virginia. This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void.”

The maps proposed by Virginia Democrats would have eliminated four Republican-held seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and given Democrats almost certain control of 10 of Virginia’s 11 congressional districts. As red state governments have been quick to redraw their own maps and likely bolster the GOP’s narrow majority in the House, Virginia Democrats are discussing appealing the state ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, despite the fact that the Virginia Supreme Court’s ruling involves neither federal law nor the U.S. Constitution.

More immediately, however, Democrats are weighing whether or not to reshape the Virginia Supreme Court’s membership and simply have the ruling overturned. According to The New York Times, Virginia Democrats participated in a conference call with U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), where they discussed the possibility of retiring sitting Virginia Supreme Court justices en masse and replacing them with partisan judges who would quickly overturn the redistricting ruling.

The plot hinges on Democrats in the general assembly lowering the mandatory retirement age for Virginia Supreme Court justices from 73 (misidentified by The New York Times as 75) to 54, which would effectively remove all seven current justices from the bench as the youngest currently serving, Justice Stephen R. McCullough, turned 54 years old in February. “Virginia judges are appointed by the General Assembly, where Democrats hold majorities in both chambers and could then fill vacancies on the court with sympathetic Democratic lawyers,” The New York Times reported, referring to the strategy as an “unusual gambit.”

Democratic officials cited by the NYT openly advocated for “doing whatever was necessary to preserve the map voters approved in last month’s referendum — including replacing the state’s Supreme Court justices.” U.S. Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.) told the news outlet, “Everyone has got to have a strong stomach right now; this is a complete disaster waiting to happen if people are timid.” Subramanyam, who participated in the call with Jeffries and others, accused Republicans in other states of “ignoring their constitutions and interrupting early voting and ignoring their Supreme Courts all together.”

In an appearance on NewsNation’s “The Hill Sundays,” Virginia Rep. Jennifer McClellan (D) said that “all options” are “on the table” for Virginia Democrats. “We’re going to fight every way possible, whether that’s through the courts, whether that’s through legislatures or whether that’s at the ballot box,” McClellan said. Like Subramanyam, she accused Republicans of attempting to disenfranchise ethnic minority voters following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling gutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. “I am focused on making sure that this November we pick up as many of these seats in Virginia as possible, no matter what the ultimate map looks like,” the legislator said, “and that we fight against what the Jim Crow South is doing to dilute Black voters and eliminate Black representation so that they can get a Republican Congress, because they know the only way they can win is not on the merits of their ideas and actions, but by rigging these maps.”

Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, a professor of Public Law at the George Washington University Law School, warned in a Fox News op-ed that while the Democrats’ power grab is unlikely to succeed before the midterm elections in November (if it succeeds at all), the fact that it has been suggested is indicative of the lengths to which the Democratic Party will go to take power. “In the unlikely chance that this could pass the General Assembly (I am assuming that there remain some things that certain Democratic members just will not do), it would be difficult to engineer before the midterm elections, given the likely challenges. However, it is the inclination of some to try such measures that is chilling,” Turley wrote.

Noting that some Democrats have advocated packing (adding partisan judges to) both Virginia’s Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court, he continued, “The new proposal for the gut-and-pack scheme is even more cynical and brutal. Ironically, the Virginia Supreme Court declared the redistricting effort by the Democrats as not only unconstitutional but ‘wholly unprecedented in Virginia’s history.’ It characterized the state’s position as ‘a story of the tail wagging the dog that has no tail.’” Turley added, “The response of … Democratic activists is now to suggest just shooting the dog and adopting a type of politically modified puppy bred to serve.”

“Notably, the gut-and-pack scheme sets aside any pretense of principle. The Democrats would simply adopt a ridiculously low retirement age for the sole purpose of populating the court with reliable and robotic justices,” Turley observed, suggesting that the open discussion of the plan is “another chilling reminder of the growing radicalization on the left.” The legal scholar compared such Democrats to the Jacobins, the French radicals responsible for the bloody massacres of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. “‘By any means’ has become a rallying cry on the left,” Turley stated. “In destroying bridges to cross-over voters in the purple state, what is left is raw political brutality. You must dump-and-pump in seeking radical measures to grab power. In the process, no court or institution is sacred in the cause of social and political change.”

Turley also pointed out that many of those suggesting measures to eliminate Virginia’s Supreme Court justices and replace them with partisan lawyers are the same Democrats attempting to retake control of the U.S. House and calling for packing the U.S. Supreme Court.

Another prong of the Virginia Democrats’ scheme to implement redistricting is to invalidate the previous constitutional amendment that established a nonpartisan redistricting commission in the first place. The argument rests on a ruling from the Tazewell County Circuit Court, which determined that the Democrats’ redistricting measure was illegal in part because they did not follow a mandatory notice-posting period. Citing that ruling, the Democrats would argue that the same provision was not followed in 2026, when the General Assembly advanced a proposed constitutional amendment to establish the redistricting commission, and that power to redistrict therefore still rests in the legislature’s hands.

As red states successfully redraw congressional district maps, Jeffries has pledged to meet Republicans with “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.” In a Friday interview, the top Democrat in the U.S. House claimed, “It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment, and it’s unprecedented in American history as far as we can tell that an actual election has been overturned by a handful of unelected judges.” He added, “We’re not going to step back, we will continue to fight back.”