With the YES campaign having won the redistricting referendum fair and square (by about 3 points – bigger than Glenn Youngkin’s narrow margin of victory in November 2021, by the way) – Virginia Republicans are taking it all in stride, like the adults they are, committed to accepting the results of elections and the will of the people that they are, and…hahahahaha, yeah right! In fact, Virginia Republicans are going NUTS, with their party’s leader (Donald Trump) ranting falsely about a supposedly “RIGGED” election, with Virginia Republicans hoping that a right-wing-activist judge will overturn the will of Virginia’s voters, and with right wingers on social media ominously threatening secession and other unnamed “consequences.” Also, they just keep spewing out a wildly skewed narrative, an alternate reality in which this entire situation wasn’t 100% created by THEIR LEADER, Donald Trump, pushing to destroy our democracy, including his efforts to rig the midterm elections so that Republicans can hang on to their narrow majority in the U.S. House, no matter what the (large?) majority of voters decide this November.
Anyway, with that background, this morning on the floor of the Virginia Senate, Majority Leader Scott Surovell (D-Fairfax) delivered a superb speech, pushing back HARD on a lot of Republicans’ bullshit. Check it out, below. Also note that right after Sen. Surovell spoke, far-right Republicans Mark Obenshain (ObenSHAME, actually) and Bill Stanley responded with a torrent of lies (Stanley falsely claimed that the crime rate was practically nonexistent in VA09; check out the actual statistics here), disinformation, whining about Democrats mentioning the name of their cult leader Donald Trump, and even thinly veiled threats (Obenshain: “Mark my words. People are angry and they’re just gonna get more angry. There will be a reckoning…if this stands, there will be a price that will be paid here in the Commonwealth of Virginia.“). So with that, here are some FACTS from Sen. Surovell.
“The rhetoric of the morning calls on me to respond. So first of all, Madam President, I find it rather rich that I’ve heard calls about anything being rigged in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The oldest legislature in our country, the oldest statement of democracy in the western hemisphere…the state that founded the Bill of Rights which led the Declaration of Rights which led to the Bill of Rights which led to rights all across the world being adopted and codified. It’s ironic to me, IRONIC, because the only rigging that’s occurred in this country in the last six years has come from across the river. The only rigging of any election has come from that man across the river.
Seven things I want to tell you about. Number one: the current system right now, if it’s rigged in any way, number one, there was a Supreme Court seat that was stolen, some would say more. And we have a current branch of government at the federal level, two branches in fact, which are completely incapable of checking power. Checks and balances on power is something that this state was founded on. The leaders of this state led the world in creating that concept, people like Madison and Jefferson, that doesn’t exist at the federal level right now because that system is rigged. The man across the river has also asked tried to rig the next election.
He’s asked the Department of Homeland Security to assemble a list of of voters that only voters the federal government can say can vote even, though the constitution of our country specifically says elections are administered by… the state, not by the [federal] government.
He’s also, number three, completely dismantled the United States Department of Justice’s public integrity section, which doesn’t seem to even exist anymore.
Number four, he directed the United States Postal Service not to expedite the delivery of mail-in ballots. He’s tried to flex his muscle on mail-in ballots, something that that we have promoted in this state extensively. Why would he do that? Well, if he saw the election results that happened a couple days ago, it’s pretty clear why he’s trying to rig the results…
Number five, he has preemptively tried to question the results of our next election before it’s even occurred to try to lay the groundwork for these kinds of calls which you just heard in this chamber. He even claimed that the election on Tuesday was rigged, when there’s absolutely zero evidence of it.
Beyond that, and most importantly, he’s tried to rig the map. He told Texas to go ahead and redraw their map so that Virginia wouldn’t have a voice. So, they did it in Texas, then they did it in North Carolina, and they did it in Missouri, then they did it in Ohio, and now they’re asking to do it in Florida to try to deprive our state of having a voice at the federal level. Our country has not seen an assault on its separation of power, on our federal system, on our democracy, anything like we’ve seen from this guy.
And Madam President, the idea that the voters somehow didn’t understand what was going on on Tuesday is preposterous. Virginians are not that stupid. First of all, I just want to remind the body that if you remove the ninth congressional district from the last election results from 2025, Abigail Spanburger won this state by 20%. Go do the numbers. The rest of the state voted 60%-40% if you take the ninth congressional district out of it. Just go do the math. The map was disclosed to the voters before they had a chance to vote on it. We put it out there. We said, ‘Here’s the map that’s going to be adopted.’ The idea that people didn’t know on Tuesday what they’re voting for is preposterous. It was right there. This is what you’re voting for. It was important. We got it out two months ago. It was advertised all across the Commonwealth. You had to be living under a rock if you don’t know what you were voting for. People also know how to read. They can read the ballot question. They can read lots of other resources. And a lot of money was spent trying to educate people about what the map said…And I trust the voters of Virginia more than that. I think they know how to read. I think they know how to watch TV, listen to the radio. I think they understand how to figure things out on their own. And I trust them to make the right decision.
Madam President, I would say that as we all leave today, I would suggest that everybody in this chamber, as they leave this chamber, walk out the door right down there and there’s a statue of a man that’s sat there since this place was built, a man who came from my district who led the fight in this country to fight against the exact things the man across the river would like to have happen, like to go back…to a monarchy, go back to a president that has unchecked power. And I would suggest that as the senator of Northern Fairfax just mentioned, as you contemplate the 250th anniversary of democracy in this country and the assault that is being that is being directed at our democracy, you think about it as you walk by George Washington and everything he did to make sure that we could be here in this chamber today to have the democracy that we do.”
P.S. Check out the entire video…including some great speeches by Sen. Mamie Locke, Sen. Stella Pekarsky, Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, Sen. Lamont Bagby, etc, etc.
