WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

It's Friday, May 8th, and this is a special bonus episode of Here and Now Anytime, from NPR and WBUR.

I'm Chris Bentley. Today, in a surprise ruling, the Virginia Supreme Court threw out new voting maps

that would have likely helped Democrats pick up four seats in Congress this fall.

Democrats and Republicans are pushing to redraw congressional maps all across

the country outside the normal process every 10 years. It's a fight that President Trump kicked off

last year in Texas to try to ensure Republican control of the House in the upcoming midterm elections.

Democrats are outraged by today's ruling, and we'll hear from one of them in just a minute.

We will appeal this because at the end of the day, what the Virginia court is doing is subverting

the will of the people. But first, more on the case itself. NPR's Larry Kaplow told Indira

Lachshmanon, the Virginia court said there were procedural problems with last year's

referendum that was approved by voters. This came down to a lot of very technical questions

about the complicated process that Virginia had to go through to try to redistrict before the

midterms. Virginia is a state that usually has a bipartisan commission

do the redistricting. That's in the state constitution. So Virginia lawmakers, Democrats, to get this done,

had to amend the constitution. That takes a public vote. And the court and the Republicans who argued against us said that they violated their own

legislative procedures in very technical ways. For example, they had to vote at the end of October

to get this, they had to vote twice, once in October and then once when the new legislature

was formed after the

November elections, Virginia, as an aside, they do their elections in off years. And the court

said that they voted too late in October before voters to understand what their lawmakers were doing

when they went to vote in November. It was procedural, but they said that those

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