The Courts Struck Down Virginia’s Gerrymander. Here Is a List of Times the GOP Has Ignored Court Rulings and Just Done What They Wanted Without Consequence.
How many times should we keep making the same error and not changing our strategy?
On Friday, May 8, 2026, the Supreme Court of Virginia voided the redistricting referendum that 1.6 million Virginians had approved three weeks earlier, and the Democratic governor expressed her disappointment while the Democratic attorney general announced an appeal to the US Supreme Court, and the map went back in the drawer.
January 22 to 26, 2024. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that federal agents could resume cutting Texas concertina wire at Eagle Pass. Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott posted “this is not over” and installed more wire within hours. Twenty-five Republican governors backed him. The federal government never enforced the ruling.
2021 to 2022. The Ohio Supreme Court struck down the Republican legislature’s congressional and legislative maps five times as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders. Ohio Republicans ran out the clock and held the 2022 elections on the maps the court had ruled illegal. They won the seats.
2022 to 2024. A federal court ruled in 2022 that Louisiana's congressional map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by packing Black voters into a single district when the state's Black population justified two. Judge Shelly Dick ordered the Louisiana Republican legislature to draw a new map with a second majority-Black district. The legislature adjourned without drawing one despite Judge Dick's threat of a contempt ruling, and Louisiana held the 2022 congressional elections on the map a federal court had already ruled illegal.
August 2022 to August 2023. A federal court ruled in August 2022 that Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis violated the First Amendment when he suspended elected state attorney Andrew Warren for signing a public statement saying he would not prosecute abortion cases. DeSantis never reinstated Warren. A year later, DeSantis suspended a second elected state attorney, Monique Worrell, on the same theory. She was never reinstated either.
2021 to 2025. A federal court ruled in early 2022 that Alabama’s congressional map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by giving Black voters only one of seven districts when the state’s Black population justified two. The Supreme Court affirmed that ruling 5-4 in Allen v. Milligan in June 2023, and ordered Alabama to draw a second majority-Black district. The Alabama Republican legislature passed a 2023 map without the second district anyway. Alabama held the 2022 elections on the original illegal map.
November 10, 2021. A federal judge ruled Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott’s executive order banning school mask mandates violated the Americans with Disabilities Act and barred Attorney General Ken Paxton from enforcing it against school districts. Paxton and Abbott pursued the case anyway, and the Texas Education Agency kept issuing guidance prohibiting school districts from requiring masks. They did not comply despite disobeying the federal courts ruling.
June 26, 2018. Federal Judge Dana Sabraw issued a nationwide preliminary injunction ordering the Trump administration to stop separating migrant children from their parents and to reunite every family within 30 days, with children under five reunited within 14. The Trump administration kept separating families anyway, citing pretexts like dirty diapers, expired driver's licenses, and minor traffic stops. Over 1,100 additional children were taken from their parents between June 2018 and the end of 2019. Some have still not been reunited seven years later.
September 1957. The Supreme Court had ruled in Brown v. Board three years earlier that segregated schools were unconstitutional. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to block nine Black students from entering Central High School. Eisenhower had to federalize the Guard and send in the 101st Airborne to enforce the ruling. Faubus was reelected three more times.
1954 to 1964. The Supreme Court had ruled school segregation unconstitutional. Out of ten thousand school districts in seventeen segregated states, only 723 complied by the 1956-57 school year. Mississippi and Louisiana made attending a desegregated school a criminal act. The states stayed segregated for another decade.
Every entry above is a state government, a federal administration, or a sitting president deciding that what the Court said and what the government would do were two different things. In each case the republic kept going, the bills kept passing, the governors stayed in office, and the presidents finished their terms. As Harvard law professor Richard Fallon has put it, judicial authority in the United States exists within “politically constructed bounds”; that is the country, and that has always been the country. If the referee is going to rig the game then you don’t fix things by abiding the corrupt and openly partisan decisions.
The regime already plans to go full scale on voter intimidation and voter disenfranchisement, no level of appeasement or playing nice will change that.Want to do something about all this?
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I can't decide if Democrats are really this naive and think that following the rules will ultimately get the fascists out of office, or if they are actively standing down because they are being paid to do so. (See AIPAC donations.) This post dovetails nicely with @Noah Berlatsky's latest article regarding the Democrats. He correctly points out the Democrats don't have a messaging problem, they have a fascists-are-disenfranchising-voters problem. https://noahberlatsky.substack.com/p/if-your-voters-cant-vote-your-messaging?r=fi0jn&utm_medium=ios
Thanks for putting all this in one place, Christopher. It’s even worse than you indicate. You omitted numerous times in which Trump has ignored court rulings this term.
Virginia should simply ignore the court and use the new maps. Period.