The Virginia Vote Is Exactly What Madison Warned About

Redistricting to cement the vote is the opposite of democracy

The morning after Virginia voters approved a constitutional amendment letting the state legislature bypass its bipartisan redistricting commission and impose a map giving Democrats the electoral advantage in 10 of the state’s 11 congressional districts, former President Barack Obama posted a statement on X:

“Congratulations, Virginia! Republicans are trying to tilt the midterm elections in their favor, but they haven’t done it yet. Thanks for showing us what it looks like to stand up for our democracy and fight back.”

Say what?

A former president of the United States publicly described the successful imposition of one of the most extreme partisan gerrymanders of the 2026 cycle as standing up for our democracy. This is the man who wrote, just six years ago, that “for too long, gerrymandering has contributed to stalled progress and warped our representative government.”

My, how times change.

I’m finishing my book on the American covenant and how it can survive, and I discuss the specific issue of gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is the cleanest live example of what our Founding Fathers were most afraid of, and the current escalation between Texas, California, Virginia, and now probably Florida is a textbook instance of the failure mode James Madison named in 1787.

James Madison’s analysis in Federalist No. 10 was not that factions could be eliminated but that the Constitution had to be designed to prevent any single faction — including a majority faction — from using the machinery of government to entrench itself against the rest. The entire architecture follows from this premise. The Bill of Rights exists to constrain majorities. The Senate gives small states equal representation so a numerical majority cannot simply dominate them. The amendment process requires supermajorities. Judicial review places constitutional interpretation outside direct majoritarian control. Federalist No. 51 states the logic of the whole project in one sentence: If men were angels, no government would be necessary. The framers assumed men would not be angels, least of all the men they themselves were, and built the Constitution accordingly.

Partisan gerrymandering is the pure form of what that architecture exists to prevent: a temporary majority distorting the mechanism by which future majorities are measured. Calling it democracy is a redefinition of the word to mean my team wins more seats.

And it is practiced, enthusiastically, by both parties whenever they have the power to do so. Texas Republicans redrew their map last year for partisan advantage at Donald Trump’s urging. Virginia Democrats have now done the same, complete with a district in western Virginia that lumps together three Democratic-leaning college towns to dilute Republican votes around them, and a northern Virginia district that extends like a lobster claw to consume Republican rural areas. Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio have redrawn maps for Republican advantage. Florida is next. California went first. Neither party defends gerrymandering on principle. Both defend their own instances of it as regrettable necessity given what the other side is doing. That is the exact logic the framers designed the Constitution to break.

The Obama framing is worth focusing on because it is so precisely the covenant violation in its most distilled form. When gerrymandering is called a threat to democracy while the other side is doing it, and standing up for democracy when your side is doing it, the word “democracy” has been detached from any meaning and repurposed as a tribal marker. That detachment is itself the covenant breach. The founders’ concern was that citizens would come to see every procedural rule as an obstacle when it produced outcomes they disliked and as a principle when it produced outcomes they preferred. Obama’s post-vote statement is that concern made explicit. The Republican position is the mirror image, and the mirror is the point.

The Supreme Court has already declined to police this. In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), the Court ruled that partisan gerrymandering is a political question beyond federal judicial review. The ruling was legally defensible. It was also a signal that this particular abuse will not be corrected from outside. If it is corrected at all, it will be corrected by citizens who decide the structural integrity of the system matters more than their team’s temporary advantage.

As I argue in the book, following the process is consistently more important than the results — even if one can prove the results are wrong. I use that argument about the 2020 election: even if the results were fraudulent and the existing system somehow could not correct it, stick to the process and fix it in the future; don’t throw it out the window.

Calling this a bipartisan problem undersells it. Changing the rules to favor your party is a direct assault on the entire basis of the American system. It is, literally, un-American. And both parties aren’t trying to change the system in their favor in smoke-filled rooms — they are proud of it.

There are real solutions. None of them are mysterious. Non-partisan independent redistricting commissions and algorithmic redistricting are just two of them. The current system - entirely legal and entirely unethical - is what needs to be changed, and neither party has any incentive to make that change nationwide.

The test for any citizen, right now, is whether you can say this: my own party should not be doing this, regardless of what the other party is doing, and I will support the reform that constrains my own side. If you cannot say that, you have become part of the problem the Constitution was designed to prevent. This is the specific majority-restraint failure Madison, Jefferson, and Washington all identified as the thing most likely to destroy the republic they were building.

A former president congratulated Virginia yesterday for showing what it looks like to stand up for democracy by ratifying a constitutional carve-out that lets the legislature draw a map engineered to produce a 10-1 partisan outcome. The next chance to get this right — Florida, probably, within weeks — will be presented to Republicans as a necessary response to Virginia, exactly as Virginia was presented to Democrats as a necessary response to Texas. Someone has to stop the escalation.

The Constitution begins with “We the People.” This is an issue that cannot be adjudicated by courts. It is up to us, the people, to tell our representatives that we care more about the future of America than the success of their party.

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This piece draws on material from my forthcoming book on the American covenant. Subscribers to this Substack are getting the argument developed chapter by chapter in the run-up to release.