Virginia House Speaker says they may redraw maps to give Democrats 10-1 advantage

Virginia House Speaker says they may redraw maps to give Democrats 10-1 advantageSource: UVA Center for Politics

Transcript

00:00I don't know how y'all did, but I grew up in Third Ward in Houston, and if a bully

00:04came and punched you in the mouth, you didn't sit there and cry. You better

00:07punch back unless you're gonna keep getting punched. And that's where we are

00:09right now. We have a bully, and he has a bully pulpit, and he's bullying these

00:13folks in these states to change the rules. And so we have an opportunity, we

00:17have an obligation, I think, to stand up and do something different. And in

00:21Virginia, because we have this this trifecta, we have opportunity to do

00:26some redistricting, to look at redrawing the maps. Our congressional

00:30delegation right now is six, five Democrats, six Democrats, five

00:34Republicans. You know, 10-1 is not out of the realm. And I think, yeah, I mean, you laugh.

00:40No, I'm not joking. No, 10-1 is not out of the realm to be able to draw the

00:45maps in a succinct community-based way, but we're gonna take a look at it. We

00:49have to, with the Congress right now, it's like a three-vote difference. And so if

00:53he keeps rigging these things by one and twosies and threesies, we have to push

00:57back. And so right now, Virginia's gonna have an opportunity. We have a long

01:00process to do that. Ultimately, the voters decide. The legislation, we have to

01:07make a constitutional amendment. We've already voted for the first resolution. In

01:11Virginia, you have to vote for it twice with an intervening election. So we voted

01:15for it once. We had an election. We'll vote for it again, more than likely on

01:19January 14th. That's why I say things happen fast. And then, once we do that,

01:25we'll set a date, pass a legislation to set a date for an election to happen on

01:31whether we should adopt that proposed constitutional amendment to allow us to

01:35do mid, what they call, the disentennial, right, every 10 years. So a

01:41mid-discentennial redrawing of the maps. And that's what we would do.