Virginia at a crossroads: Are we Virginians or are we partisans? | Tanveer Kathawalla
Progressive policy ambitions meet practical realities as Americans weigh costs and consequences.
The coverage treats Virginia’s redistricting fight as a morality play about “good government,” as if the only question is whether you trust the latest reform label. That framing skips the more basic issue: who gains power, and who loses a voice, when the rules are rewritten midstream. Democrats’ amendment is sold as independence, but it reads like **process as politics**.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
Virginia Democrats’ proposed redistricting amendment is a partisan power grab that would overturn the will of voters, dismantle bipartisan reform, and drag the commonwealth back toward the machine‐politics era we fought so hard to escape.
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
The coverage treats Virginia’s redistricting fight as a morality play about “good government,” as if the only question is whether you trust the latest reform label. That framing skips the more basic issue: who gains power, and who loses a voice, when the rules are rewritten midstream.
Democrats’ amendment is sold as independence, but it reads like process as politics. Virginians were promised a bipartisan check on mapmaking. Replacing it with a structure that can be gamed by appointments and lawsuits is not modernization, it is institutional drift dressed up as reform.
Conservatives care about public trust, rule of law, and stable rules that outlast one election. Redistricting should limit self dealing, not move it behind new curtains.
The principle at stake is simple: a system that protects voters from politicians, not politicians from voters.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.