‘Breathtakingly Dumb’: Fox’s Jonathan Turley Torches Democrats Over ‘Colossal’ Gerrymandering Loss

Fox News’ Jonathan Turley torched Virginia Democrats on Friday over their “breathtakingly dumb” effort to carve up their state’s congressional map ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Turley’s comments came hours after the Virginia Supreme Court threw out the new map — which would have given Democrats an advantage in 10 out of 11 districts — during the following conversation with Sean Hannity:

HANNITY: I said this from the beginning, this will never, ever meet judicial scrutiny. Number one, the wording itself of the amendment was abusively biased. I think any objective person would say that, but that’s not even the main thing. They have very strict constitutional procedures that they had to meet. They didn’t follow any of the procedures to get an amendment on the ballot, none of them!

TURLEY: No, that’s absolutely right, Sean, and there was a host of problems, but the most glaring was that one. Virginia was always the gold standard for gerrymandering. Virginia doesn’t like gerrymandering — makes it very difficult to do so. They have a commission to avoid gerrymandering. So to get this through, they had to do a sort of bum’s rush to get this in before the midterm elections. And the Supreme Court of Virginia said, “No, we’re not going to sign off on this.”

Now, this was a face-planting of legendary size for Governor [Abigail] Spanberger. She had previously assured voters that she was vehemently against gerrymandering. And as soon as she was elected, she went to the hard left, and then asked and pushed through the most radical gerrymandering scheme in the country. And so this is a remarkable effort that has resulted in a massive loss for the Democrats. They spent a fortune to get this thing through.

HANNITY: Sixty-four, 64 million.

TURLEY: Yeah! In addition to the 64 million, they alienated half of this state. You know, a lot of Republicans and independents are not going to forget this. They don’t view this as partisan, they view it as personal. You attempted to erase them in terms of representation. So all these statewide Democrats that supported this will have to face those voters again, and they’re not going to forget.

HANNITY: Let me ask you, when you couple this with the Supreme Court decision as it relates to racial gerrymandering, and now all these states now are going to reconfigure the maps in those states. I mean, I’ve read estimates Republicans in total could get 20 more, you know, R-plus districts out of it.

TURLEY: This was a just breathtakingly dumb move by the Democrats. When they began, when they went down this road, I wrote a column saying, you need to consider this because the Democratic states were already gerrymandered. So the Republicans had more ability to create new districts than the Democrats did. In Illinois, Massachusetts, California now recently, those are all gerrymandered states. But some of those states had done that years ago. So that the ability to pick up states favored the GOP.

Now that Virginia has blown this opportunity, the GOP is in a unique position. There are states moving after the Supreme Court decision to redesign districts, because as many as a dozen districts are now presumptively unconstitutional due to racial gerrymandering. And putting all of that aside, you have the 2[0]30 Census coming up. The Democrats were awarded districts erroneously in the view of many of us. That will be corrected, but on top of you of this exodus of people from blue states to red states. So, the GOP will pick up more seats after the census. So the Democrats are looking at a colossal loss. And I think that’s one of the reasons why they want to pack the Supreme Court and make radical changes to the constitutional system before it’s too late.

Watch above via Fox News.

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