Welcome to the three martini lunch. Grab a stole next to Greg Carumbus of Radio America and Jim Garrity of National Review.

Three martini's coming up. Welcome to the last call of the week for the three martini lunch. This is our weekly recap of the biggest stories of the week. And our biggest story of this week came while Craig Collins was filling in for me.

Here's how he and Jim Garrity handled the news.

My name is Craig Collins filling in.

Thrilled to be helping out on today's show.

And a lot of big things feel like they're in the news, especially one, depending on when you're listening to this.

They may have just come out or may have come out a while ago.

But it's a very big decision, one that I think a lot of people were actually expecting to be the end result in Virginia.

Jim, do you want to tell us more about the Supreme Court decision to fire down all of the redistricting efforts in Virginia.

Sure. You know, as our listeners probably recall, Virginia passed a referendum earlier this year that was going to take the state from its current semi-close division to 10 to 1. Republicans vehemently opposed it. There were a whole bunch of other folks who are not Republicans who did not like the idea because it was not just maximizing the Democratic advantage. Where I live in Fairfax County was going to be represented by five district, different congressional districts. One of my favorite jokes from my friend Eric Telford was, I was a great house for sale in Fairfax County. It's got three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and the house is divided over five congressional districts. That's how...

So about two weeks ago, or, you know, they made the oral arguments before the state

Supreme Court arguing that the mid-decade redistricting was unconstitutional.

Folks, I know and respect were saying the oral arguments went very well for our side, so to speak. The Republicans, the folks who didn't want to see them redrawn. Craig, I don't know about you. I feel like I've seen enough cases where the oral arguments seem to go well for the side you want to see. And then the decision comes out the other way. So maybe it's John Roberts and Obamacare. whatever it is, I just kind of don't count any chickens until they hatch. But it has come down that way. And so on the one hand, I'm very happy with this. The entire time, though, I've kind of wondered. And I've heard people saying, oh, don't worry, this is struck down by the state Supreme Court. State Supreme Court is supposedly a very small C conservative. By that,

I don't necessarily mean ideological. I mean cautious, right? So their argument before the referendum was

like, look, we can't rule that this is unconstitutional because it hasn't happened yet. There's no

argument. You can't bring a case against this. Go forward with the referendum. Then we will evaluate whether or not it violates the state constitution.

Now, I am like, well, if it's unconstitutional, stop it as quickly as possible.

Don't, you know, don't let people forward with it.

Do this before we spend $5 million administrating the election statewide.

And as you pointed out before we started taping, tens of millions in advertising.

Yeah. All, you know, now moot because the process was in violation of the state constitution.

So look, all in all, I'm happy. I imagine if you're Democrats, you are, you know, not just P-Oed about this result.

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