May Dazed
Virginia and North Carolina and Arizona and New Hampshire, oh my
*Now that we have a ruling in the Virginia redistricting case, you can read all about how it’s total nonsense here.
Hot dang, it’s May!
When I was really young (we’re talking age 5-10) and went to a tiny private school (where my Woodland Academy Wolves at! … okay probably nowhere), May Day festivities were a super big deal. I’ll save my lil walk down memory lane for the end of this missive, though, because there are way more important things to get through first, and the odds that a random childhood memory is interesting to you at all are, understandably, not huge!
Morning Hour
We’ll start by picking up where I left off yesterday: Virginia and its redistricting referendum.
So, yes, while the certification of last week’s vote was supposed to happen today, Republicans’ pet judge in Southwest Virginia issued a ruling blocking it, and the Virginia Supreme Court declined to block that block, allowing Judge Hurley’s order to stand.
But that’s far from the last word – the issues at play in that case mirror the issues in the case SCOVA heard arguments on this past Monday.
The issue at … ah, issue is whether or not Virginia Democratic lawmakers followed the rules when passing the amendment.
What rules, you wonder? Glad you asked!
To change Virginia’s constitution, proposed amendments must pass the full legislature twice — with an intervening election for one or both chambers (i.e. an odd-year election) — before going to voters for final approval.
That second legislative vote has to come at least 90 days before the amendment goes before voters for approval or rejection.
Republicans claim that process was not followed properly, pointing to questions about
whether there was a valid “intervening election,”
whether the amendment should have been voted on at all during a special session originally intended for budget matters, and
whether a 100-year-old law that enforced part of an obsolete state constitution that hasn’t been invoked regarding any other constitutional amendment in the past 50 years should still apply.
One thing at a time (and big ups to Virginia attorney Timothy Heaphy for this great piece breaking everything down).
First: What is Election Day, anyway?
Despite the GOP’s current crusade against voting by mail and insistence that all votes must be counted on Election Day and Election Day only, Virginia Republicans are conveniently arguing that Election Day actually includes the early/mail-in voting period.
Hence, they claim, “intervening election” means … not actual Election Day.
“Election” is clearly defined in Virginia’s constitution: “the Tuesday succeeding the first Monday in November.”
The redistricting referendum passed the legislature the first of the required two times on Oct. 31, 2025 — before the Nov. 4 election.
During Monday’s arguments, two of the conservative justices (NB: most of the court was appointed by a fully GOP-controlled or divided legislature; just one of the seven justices received approval by a Democratic House and Senate) really dug into the “what is Election Day really” argument. We’ll see what side of the ruling they come down on.
Second: The “Rule of 51”
The more fun (... for some definition of fun) question was about the special session during which the amendment passed the first of the two required times – specifically, whether taking up a constitutional amendment was even allowed.
That legislative vote occurred in 2025, but the special session that allowed that vote was originally convened on May 13, 2024, by Republican then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin to address discrepancies between his and the legislature’s budgets.
That all got sorted, but the state Senate (all hail Louise Lucas) never gaveled out, which meant that the 2024 special session didn’t actually conclude until …Jan. 14, 2026 (the first day of this year’s General Assembly session).
Before you start wondering if Virginia Dems have some kind of anti-Trump crystal ball and knew to leave the session going so they could pass the redistricting amendment before the 2025 election, lemme explain why that 2024 special session lasted 612 days:
During the summers and falls of 2024 and 2025, Virginia had a Republican governor.
He made a lot of appointments to boards and commissions (most specifically, the boards of major colleges and universities) that Democrats weren’t wild about.
When the legislature is in session, it has the power to sign off on – or reject – gubernatorial appointments. When it’s not, the governor can appoint anybody he likes and, even if the legislature rejects them in the next session, they can stay on the board until they’re replaced.
So after the budget got passed in mid-2024, the Senate used the Rule of 51 to change the scope of the special session and blocked a whole slew of Youngkin appointees – 22 of them, specifically.
But don’t give Democrats too much credit – they got this idea from their Republican colleagues, who used the same trick to block judicial appointments by Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe during his term.
FWIW, I think the justices will very much not want to muck about with legislative procedure, so I think the other issue to watch pertains to a 99-year-old law that hasn’t been relevant for 55 years.
Third: The “posting requirement.”
There’s an old-ass law (as in, from 1927) still on the books in Virginia requiring that proposed constitutional amendments are posted on courthouse doors 90 days before the amendment goes before voters for approval or rejection.
This law was intended to enforce the “published for three months” part of constitutional amendment procedure in the version of the state’s constitution in 1927, which was ratified in 1902.
Information was a lot harder to come by then, so posting in such a place – especially in more rural parts of the Commonwealth – was probably the most effective way of making sure as many folks as possible were aware of it.
But that 1902 constitution went poof! 55 years ago.
Virginia’s current constitution was approved in 1971, and (you can read for yourself) the updated amendment procedure does not include a specific “publication” requirement in the era of (more) modern communication – just that there had to be at least 90 days between passage of the amendment and the amendment going before voters for approval or rejection.
The redistricting amendment passed 95 days before the April 21 special election, by the by.
None of this is to say that I know how the Virginia Supreme Court will come down on the redistricting amendment.
But in addition to the fact that there are clear legal rebuttals to all of the GOP’s claims (someone really dug deep to find that old “posting” law), more than 1.6 million voters approved the amendment, and any court should be reluctant to overturn the results of an election [[stares in Bush v. Gore]].
First Reading
North Carolina Republicans (who, let’s not forget, gave Donald Trump an additional GOP congressional seat for this year’s midterms) are back on their culture war bullshit.
I think a lot about the fact that the Tar Heel State looks like an upside-down Virginia
In the long-ago time of 2023, the GOP majorities in NC passed a so-called “Parents’ Bill of Rights.”
I guess that sounds a lot better than “Don’t Say Gay,” which is what the bill really is.
This law mandates that no mention of anything related to sexual orientation or gender identity can occur in class or be included in curricula in K-4 classrooms.
Republicans declined to extend this censorship to school libraries at the time, but apparently that was merely an oversight on their part.
Now they’re trying to extend their extreme censorship of stuff that’s just a part of life ffs to school libraries, and they’re threatening to not pay school district leaders and impose fines if their book-banning demands go unheeded.
Second Reading
But if you think that’s bad, well … Republicans in Arizona want to throw librarians in jail if their libraries contain pretty much anything sexual and they’re so much as looked at by anyone under the age of 18.
…except rape or sexual assault. Apparently Arizona GOPers think it’s totally okay to outlaw books containing anything sexual EXCEPT sex crimes.
State Sen. Jake Hoffman’s bill, which passed the Senate in February and is currently being considered in the House, would make librarians deemed in violation of the measure guilty of a goddamn felony.
Do you live in Arizona? You may want to consider reaching out to your state representative to urge them to not turn librarians into felons
Third Reading
With 400 members making only $100 per year, it’s fairly inevitable that some members of the New Hampshire state House can be …interesting (not like, oh-that’s-neat interesting, more like when my mom said “oh that’s an interesting look” when she hated that I’d briefly dyed my hair purple).
And longtime readers of this missive [[waves]] are no strangers to wacky GOP antics in the Granite State.
But this antic is less wacky and more omg wtf.
Meet New Hampshire state Rep. Matt Sabourin dit Choinière (seen here posing for his high school senior pictures, apparently), an extreme right-winger who’s also clearly a raging anti-Semite.
In January, Sabourin dit Choinière (so fun to type repeatedly) teamed up with a German Holocaust denier (did you know that’s actually totally illegal in Deutschland?) to try to get New Hampshire schools to teach that the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews during said Holocaust is a hoax.
How did this happen? Glad you asked!
A cool thing about New Hampshire is that it has a Commission on Holocaust and Genocide Education that helps set educational standards and provide teaching resources around these sensitive – but crucially important – topics.
Early this year, Democratic Rep. Loren Selig – a member of the commission herself – introduced legislation to extend the commission’s term for another three years.
Sabourin dit Choinière then proposed an amendment to the measure to add a member to the commission from an extremist group led by Germar Rudolf, a longtime Holocaust denial activist (talk about a cursed phrase).
Rudolf himself testified at the hearing, which seems awfully gross.
The amendment didn’t go anywhere, but Sabourin dit Choinière’s GOP colleagues apparently weren’t too offended by the fact that their guy pulled this disgusting move.
State Republicans don’t seem to have said or done anything that could be considered a “consequence” for the antisemitic stunt.
After NPR reached out to some state Republicans about Sabourin dit Choinière’s Holocaust denialism, some GOPers did denounce antisemitism, and one congressional candidate and fellow state rep rebuked his endorsement.
Also, being a Holocaust denier is bad enough, but Sabourin dit Choinière’s buddy Rudolf is pretty, ah, sketchy.
… by which I mean that cops found him naked from the waist down at a children’s playground at 4 a.m. in 2020.
Rudolf, for his part, claimed he was doing fitness (he’s written about getting workout tips from former KKK leader David Duke) and claimed the bottle of baby oil police found on him was “lotion” he used on his dry skin for workouts.
Psst Donald Trump found an actual criminal for you to deport
Point of Personal Privilege
Okay, back to that thing I mentioned up top.
I was almost a teenager when I learned that my tiny private school’s main rite of spring – a huge May Day festival – was, ah, not normal.
Seventh and eighth graders (the most senior at the school) made up a May Court, and two of them got named king and queen, somehow (I have zero recollection of how that worked).
The rest of the grades put on performances for the May Court, culminating in the Maypole Dance by the fourth graders (just weaving big ribbons around a big pole, basically).
Afterwards, there was a big ol’ carnival. I replenished my goldfish tank every year from fishies in plastic bags I won from popping balloons with darts.
When I started at public school in fifth grade, I was shocked to learn that literally none of my new classmates had ever heard of such a celebration.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
