Analysis by Three Lawyers (Two From Virginia) of Tazewell County Judge's Redistricting Ruling
First, check out what Sam Shirazi has to say:
“the first thing the judge found was the legislature didn’t really follow its own internal procedures. And I won’t go into the ins and outs of it, but essentially the Democrats had to do this in a special session…to be perfectly honest, I have a hard time believing this will be upheld on appeal. I think this is the least likely grounds for the decision to be upheld, if it is upheld, because typically courts are very skeptical to get into the legislative procedure. They kind of leave that to the legislature. I think there’s a big separation of powers issue… at the end of the day, both these, both the state Senate and the House of Delegates passed this twice with majority votes.”
“The second reason why the judge ruled for the Republicans, he basically looked at the Virginia state constitution and looked at the phrase after the next election And he essentially said the election was underway when the Democrats passed the proposed constitutional amendments…Again, I’m a little bit skeptical if the Virginia Supreme Court is going to uphold that…the Virginia Constitution says it has to be passed after the next general election. It doesn’t say, you know, three months before the general the Virginia general election, it has to be passed. It doesn’t say you can’t you can’t pass it after early voting started. So a lot of that is being read into the Virginia constitution when it’s not there.”
“… this third question that the court court ruled on. And I do think you know this is probably the one where the Virginia Supreme Court will have to decide, and it’s perhaps the closest call. And the question was essentially about the state statutory provision. So it’s not part of the state constitution, it’s part of the state law. It says that after this General Assembly session, the clerk of the House of Delegates will send a notice to each of the courts in Virginia basically saying that there have been proposed constitutional amendments. The clerks of each of those courts, the law says, shall post these notices three months before the election. So obviously that didn’t happen here because the election was basically less than a week away when the Democrats passed this…I explained this in my last podcast that the Democrats argued this is essentially a quirk in the law. The Constitution was changed. This three-month requirement was removed from the Constitution, but it was never removed from the state law…it is important to note that the statute itself does not impose any requirements on the General Assembly. So the statute is basically about the duties of these clerks.”
https://bluevirginia.us/2026/01/analysis-by-three-virginia-lawyers-of-tazewell-county-judges-redistricting-ruling-a-significant-departure-from-established-practice-outlier-probably-gets-reversed/