Is this the year both parties throw Constitutional caution to the wind?

Stop the presses. It was not the Virginia Supreme Court, but a Tazewell County circuit judge, who just threw cold water on the latest Democratic triumph in the gerrymandering map wars. 

Nary a day after Virginia voters narrowly approved a constitutional amendment that could help Democrats turn the state’s current 6–5 congressional split into something closer to 10–1, a judge ordered that the results not be certified. 

Welcome to 2026, where a party can be celebrating at breakfast and lawyering up by lunch.

It’s the era of Donald Trump. The era of Obama-Biden administration chickens coming home to roost. The era of both parties pulling out all the stops to defeat the other. The consequences of failing to do so, as we saw during Donald Trump’s four year hiatus between presidential terms, could well nigh be a permanent guilty verdict in the court of public opinion, financial ruination from various and sundry court proceedings (some with more legal merit than others) and even, eventually, being thrown in jail. 

Now that the stakes are so high, which party will be the first to abolish the filibuster? Who will dismantle the electoral collage? 

Who will expand and pack the Supreme Court? And which party can gerrymander the other out of existence? 

There is a new rule emerging in the U.S. geopolitical mosh pit: Do unto others before they do unto you.”

What makes the Virginia episode so revealing is not merely its audacity. It is the collapse of memory. In 2020, Virginia voters approved a redistricting commission by 66.1%, explicitly because they were tired of politicians choosing their voters instead of the other way around. Six years later, the same state was asked to bless a temporary end run around that commission so the General Assembly could redraw congressional districts before 2031. 

The official ballot language even said the change was needed “to restore fairness,” a phrase the circuit judge found likely misleading in its own right.

That, in one neat little package, is the entire American problem. Nobody really believes this is about fairness anymore. Democrats are not even arguing that partisan map drawing has suddenly become noble. They are arguing that it has become necessary. Republicans, for their part, are not arguing that mid-decade redistricting is some sacred constitutional duty. They are arguing that politics is war by other means, and wars are not won by the side most committed to unilateral restraint. The language changes. The principle does not. 

The principle is: hit first.

To be fair, Republicans are the senior partners in this racket in some ways. The modern gerrymander era did not begin with Abigail Spanberger’s Virginia or Gavin Newsom’s California. It was Republicans, after the 2010 elections, who built the biggest and most durable structural advantage of the last decade. 

A Brennan Center analysis found that the post-2010 congressional maps were worth roughly 16 to 17 seats for Republicans in Congress. That does not make Democrats innocent. It does mean Republicans spent years perfecting the machinery before Democrats decided to stop pretending they were above using it.

Last year Trump pushed Texas Republicans to squeeze more GOP seats out of the map, and other Republican-led states followed. Democrats answered not with a lecture on norms but with a counteroffensive. California voters approved a temporary congressional remap designed to help Democrats, and the state’s own Citizens Redistricting Commission made a point of telling the public it had nothing to do with it. Virginia then followed with an even more aggressive maneuver. Florida may be next on the Republican side. This is not one party defending democracy against the other. This is an arms race.

The bleakly funny part is that the national effect of all this knife-fighting may be smaller than the rhetoric suggests. A peer-reviewed 2023 PNAS study found widespread partisan gerrymandering in the post-2020 cycle, but also found that much of it canceled out nationally, leaving only a modest net seat advantage from gerrymandering itself once geography and other factors were separated out. 

That is not exactly reassuring. 

In a way, it is worse. It means both parties are willing to torch public trust, abuse procedure, and bend constitutional language not necessarily for a decisive triumph, but often for a marginal advantage at the edge of House control.

It also means politicians are blurring every related argument into one giant soup of panic. Gerrymandering gets mixed together with census fights, sanctuary-city rhetoric, and arguments over who counts for representation. But those are not all the same thing. 

Under current law, congressional apportionment is based on total resident population, citizens and noncitizens alike. Whatever one thinks of that rule, it is distinct from drawing a district line so artfully that voters can scream all they want and still never matter. One fight is over who counts. The other is over who gets neutralized. Our political class benefits when voters stop distinguishing between them.

So yes, this really may be the year constitutional caution goes out the window. Which party will abolish the filibuster first? Which one will decide the Electoral College has outlived its usefulness? Which one will flirt again with court expansion when the judiciary becomes inconvenient? Those questions no longer sound hysterical, because the logic has already taken hold. If your opponents are expected to do unto you, then your job is to do unto them first. Virginia did not invent that rule. Virginia merely said the quiet part out loud.

The deeper problem is that a constitutional system cannot survive indefinitely on retaliatory logic. You cannot have stable rules if both parties treat every rule as temporary, every norm as optional, and every institutional restraint as something noble only until it becomes inconvenient. The redistricting blitz of 2026 is not really about maps. It is about whether either party still believes there should be areas of American political life where losing is preferable to breaking the mechanism. 

At the moment, the answer appears to be no. And that, more than any salamander-shaped district, is the real danger.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)