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As many of you know, I care passionately about redistricting reform. In 2020, I carried the Constitutional amendment to make it a reality, and for many people, I became the face of that effort because I defended it publicly and continued to defend it during the intense intra-party fight we had in the House of Delegates. I have everlasting scars from that debate.
Don Beyer once said that in his eight years as Lieutenant Governor, “the ugliest debates were the ones over partisan redistricting.” I learned just how right he was. But five years later, my faith in that amendment is even stronger. Because it worked. And don’t just take my word for it. 538, UVA, the Brennan Center and Princeton Gerrymandering Project all agree. Princeton said Virginia now has “some of the fairest district maps in the country.” The amendment delivered what we hoped for: fair maps, better and more diverse representation, and, I believe, a stronger and more effective government.
Many people point to the messy process; the gridlocked commission, the fact that the Supreme Court ultimately had to intervene as evidence the Amendment failed. But in truth, it was the very process the amendment created, along with the enabling legislation it required, which made those final, fairer maps possible.
Our process still isn’t perfect. Personally, I would prefer an independent commission without legislators sitting as part of it at all. And I hope we see an even stronger amendment drafted before the next census that we can all vote for.
But, after the qualified success of the last process and with the more balanced maps that came out of the amendment’s process, I believe the commission process will go more smoothly in 2031. And even if it doesn’t, the courts, and the framework we established for them with the enabling legislation, will once again function properly. And that will still be better than legislators drawing their own lines.
Then why are we here today? Many people have asked why I support this current revision to the redistricting amendment. I support it because it does not undo, or even come close to undoing, the hard-won redistricting reforms we fought so hard to achieve. Many of you might have seen that the former Governor Doug Wilder suggested we should scrap the whole thing, saying “strip it out of the Constitution entirely.” I would never support scrapping the amendment.
I will also not vote to change the enabling legislation that made the commission’s work possible and led to a successful Supreme Court process and fair maps. But this amendment doesn’t repeal that legislation either. If I thought any of the crucial reforms we fought for were in danger, that we were moving backward to a pre-Amendment system, I would be a “no” vote.
But that’s not what this is and that’s not what we are doing. Today, we are taking a proportional response to a truly extreme situation. The current outbreak of opportunistic mid-decade redistricting means we truly are in unprecedented, constitutional norm breaking times.
Since Baker v. Carr established the “one person, one vote” standard more than 70 years ago; we have only ever had two states redraw political lines mid-decade for purely political reasons. And we’ve never had a President threaten and strong-arm state Governors and legislators for changes to their state’s maps for partisan gains.
Yet that is exactly what we are seeing now. Because of President Trump’s jawboning, three states in the last two months, more states than in the previous 62 years, have redrawn their maps for political reasons, and more states are working to follow suit. Why? Because the President says he’s “entitled” to those seats. That is a direct quote. Entitled!
But what’s really going on here is fear – fear of facing voters.The President knows if 2026 is a fair fight, Republicans will lose seats and he will face a legislative branch willing to stand up to him and check his power.
That is why we are here. Because the President is trying to avoid accountability and avoid the voters. And so Virginia Democrats are responding proportionately. We are not trying to end the practice of fair maps. We are asking the voters if, in this one limited case, they want to ensure that Donald Trump can’t rig the entire national election by twisting the arms of a few state legislatures which haven’t reformed their process like we have. And as the Senator from Loudoun said yesterday in committee, I think my friends on the other side of the aisle know that voters will agree with us. That they too, will vote to ensure Donald Trump has to face the music in 2026.
You know, many of my friends on the other side of the aisle like to say that we, Democrats, have Trump Derangement Syndrome. And, if I’m honest, sometimes I think they are right. Sometimes Democrats do suffer from a bit of TDS and we mistake policy differences for existential crises. And we often do this to our detriment because voters don’t buy it.
But if Democrats sometimes catch the TDS bug, Republicans have become far too reliant on the diagnosis. And this is a moment where Republicans are too eager to rush to that false diagnosis rather than discuss legitimate concerns and grapple with the reality of what is happening.
That’s why we need to take a moment to look at the bigger picture, at why this measure is just as necessary now as the redistricting amendment itself was then.
But let’s be honest, no one in this body, and no Democrats nationally, should be patting themselves on the back and congratulating one another for saving democracy when they respond to Trump’s unprecedented redistricting actions. This resolution does not save democracy.
This resolution is a break glass maneuver for a truly unprecedented moment. It’s necessary, unfortunately, and it’s temporary, fortunately. It is our best attempt to bust out the first aid kit for our democratic system but it is not a perfect cure for its deeper ills.
Because in this movement we are still circling the drain with Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. We are still living on his terms of engagement. And the reality is that both parties need to rid themselves of their addiction to him if we want America to have another 250 years of constitutional democracy. We must transcend the Trumpian moment.
In Federalist 1, Alexander Hamilton argued that it was up to Americans to prove to the world that a people could form a government based on “reason and choice” rather than “accident and force”. In that essay, he also warned us that the biggest danger to our American experiment would be populist leaders. He wrote that, of “those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”
But merely avoiding the worst of the danger will not begin the process of rebuilding our democracy, and Democrats cannot rest on Hamilton’s words. In February of 1861, Abraham Lincoln said, “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” Roughly 100 years later Martin Luther King would call this America’s “promissory note.”
Yet for too long, the average American has felt disconnected from that creed, feeling that politicians – yes, including Democrats – don’t help make it true for the average person. It is partly from that frustration that we have ended up in the place where we are now.
Beginning to fix that problem means taking hard votes that cut against the status quo and revitalizes American democracy. This means banning gerrymandering federally. It means getting big money, including corporate money, out of politics at both the state and federal level. It means implementing reforms like rank choice or fusion voting, so more Americans feel heard and represented. It means reforming our primaries, ending the filibuster, and making Congress actually work again for the people they are supposed to represent.
We can look to American history to see political movements that rose to meet their moments. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Republicans passed the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments enshrining the ideals of the Declaration into the Constitution. During the Progressive Era, leaders from both parties came together to pass the 17th amendment and established state level referenda processes to give citizens more of a voice. And in the 1960s Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the 26th Amendment expanding democracy to finally fulfill full citizenship rights to African-Americans and to give young Americans a voice.
We need to meet our moment now. Because until most people feel like we are truly listening to them; not just our strongest supporters, donors, corporate lobbyists, or elites, we will never move beyond this cynical spiral of democratic apathy.
So the larger moment that this break-glass-in-case-of-emergency amendment emerges from requires more than just this one act of defense. It requires a broader commitment to democracy reform to truly end this Trumpian moment and the political will to see it through. But it also requires something less abstract, something more tangible. It requires reforms that will not only let people’s voice be felt in politics, but also give people realistic paths to more prosperous personal and economic futures.
In his 1915 speech True Americanism, Louis Brandeis noted, “if the American is to be fitted for his task as ruler, he must have besides education and industrial liberty, also some degree of financial independence.” As the famous aphorism goes, “you can’t eat a vote.”
We must meet the cost of living moment this upcoming session. That means tackling housing and energy which are the two of the biggest drivers of a family’s budget crunch. It means continuing to ensure that people can earn a decent wage at a job that provides dignity. And it means strengthening and investing in an education system that truly lifts people up and provides genuine economic mobility.
Many of these pieces of legislation will be controversial. They will require tough votes. But we must be willing to brave that controversy and stand firm in the cross-winds of opposition. Because in a moment when people are struggling and where middle-class life feels more tenuous than ever, we can’t ask people to defend democracy if democracy isn’t defending them.
Democrats must transcend President Trump and represent a clear, alternative path. But my Republican colleagues must also unwind themselves from this destructive cyclone too. Their party is in the midst of what George Washington spoke about in his Farewell Address, that partisanship would be the way to power for “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men.”
Partisanship is nothing new, and the Republicans are right that Democratic officials have had their share of partisan lowlights. But the dynamic dragging their party down is different in kind, not in degree.
From 1801 to 2020, with one awful exception, we had over 200 straight years of the peaceful transfer of power. And then in 2020 we did not. We’ve long had gerrymandering, but until now we’ve never had a President demand it from the bully pulpit. We’ve had Presidents use emergency powers, but we’ve never had a President declare emergencies as a fig leaf for their policy demands and now we do, from tariffs to deploying soldiers in American cities.
And we’ve never had a President so consistently equate political opposition with evil intention or denigrate ordinary citizens simply because they didn’t vote for him or dared to protest his actions. For example, gleefully posting a video of himself dumping excrement on American citizens is far beyond Hillary Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ or Mitt Romney’s ‘47%’ comments.
This shift from ordinary partisanship to half-cloaked authoritarianism has filtered down into Virginia. We had four members of the legislature at the January 6th insurrection. We had members of the House of Delegates call on Mike Pence to decertify Virginia’s election results despite their unimpeachable clarity and legality. And we’ve seen a Governor’s Administration illegally purge voters and deliberately withdraw us from a pact to improve election security and the reliability of our election data, all to satisfy the then-former President’s conspiratorial claims.
If Democrats sometimes suffer from the Trump Derangement System, Republicans are whistling past the grave of their party’s status as a responsible part of our constitutional system.
Pardon me for being so long Madam President, but we cannot have a proper discussion about this resolution without acknowledging the broader context – the fight over what the American constitution and American creed mean at this moment. We are having real fights, many of which will take decades to play themselves out.
But when we think about what is happening here today, we should recognize both the resolution’s importance and its limits. Its importance lies in preventing a norm-busting President from gaming the system, in ensuring there are consequences for his unpopular actions, especially those that strike at the heart of our system that is reaching its 250th birthday and remains the greatest governing system the world has seen.
But let us also not fool ourselves. The real work has only just begun.
I want to close with a quote from former President Bill Clinton. He once said, “all that is wrong with America, can be fixed by what is right with America.” I fear that many on my side of the aisle have forgotten how to use the tools from what is right with America but that President Trump and his enablers have forgotten what is right with America all together.
Thank you Madam President
