State officials asked the justices to overturn a Virginia Supreme Court decision that struck down a congressional map, a major defeat for Democrats.
Democratic leaders in Virginia asked the Supreme Court on Monday to allow the state to use a congressional map drawn by Democrats and approved by voters in a referendum in April.
In an emergency application, the state’s attorney general and other officials urged the justices to overturn a decision by the Virginia Supreme Court, which ruled last week that the redistricting process had violated the state’s Constitution, a major setback for Democrats in a fierce battle over which party will control the U.S. House.
In their filing on Monday, Virginia state officials claimed that the ruling by the state’s Supreme Court had amounted to “judicial defiance” of the will of the voters to create a new district map. The officials asserted that the state court was “deeply mistaken” on “critical issues of federal law with profound practical importance to the nation.”
Read Virginia Officials’ Emergency Application to the Supreme Court
Democratic leaders in Virginia asked the U.S. Supreme Court to allow the state to use a congressional map drawn by Democrats and approved by voters but which the state Supreme Court had struck down.
That decision, they argued, had “deprived voters, candidates and the commonwealth of their right to the lawfully enacted congressional districts.”
The state Supreme Court ruled that lawmakers had violated the multipart process to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot.