In 2020, Virginia voters did something rare: they overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment to end partisan gerrymandering. Democrats championed it. Republicans supported it. Editorials praised it. The message was clear: Virginians had had enough of politicians drawing their own districts to guarantee their own seats.

That lasted exactly six years.

On April 21, Virginians will vote on a new constitutional amendment that would let Democrats bypass the very system voters just approved, redrawing congressional maps to flip the state from 6–5 Republican to 10–1 Democrat. When a judge ruled the measure unlawful in January, Democrats appealed to the Virginia Supreme Court and got it back on the ballot within weeks. The justification? Their argument was that the Republicans in Texas did it first.

Let that sink in. The party that spent decades condemning partisan gerrymandering as a threat to democracy now argues that partisan gerrymandering is necessary to save democracy.

The proposed map is so brazenly partisan that the 8th District would stretch from Alexandria in Northern Virginia all the way to York County near the coast, a gerrymander so absurd even political scientists called it “bewildering.” Voters in the 1st District would be scattered across five different new districts.

There’s a reason this vote is in April instead of November. As Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares pointed out, turnout for an April special election might hit 20%. That’s not an accident. That’s a feature. You schedule the vote when nobody’s paying attention because you know what happens when they do: in 2020, 61% of voters said no to this kind of thing.

Constitutional principles aren’t supposed to work like this. You don’t get to champion “nonpartisan redistricting” when you’re out of power, then abandon it the moment it becomes inconvenient. That’s not governance.

Virginia voters approved rules in 2020 because they were tired of politicians rigging the system. Now those same politicians are trying to rig it again.

The Constitution doesn’t have an asterisk that says “except when the other side does it first.” Neither should Virginia’s.