Faced with a potential Democratic wave this fall, Republican legislators across the nation continue their efforts to placate Donald Trump by adopting unprecedented mid-cycle gerrymanderings designed to protect their majority in Congress.
Emboldened by the U.S. Supreme Courtโs evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in the Callais decision, Republicans just adopted new maps in Florida and Tennessee to target Democratic incumbents, including some of most senior African American representatives in the House. Thirteen states will have new congressional districts for 2026 midterms; South Carolina and Louisiana will likely join the list soon. The changes give Republicans more chances to preserve their House majority this fall.
Remember how we got here
When President Donald Trump and Republican leaders in Texas decided last year on their redistricting gambit, they ignited a political firestorm that threatens to destroy yet another political guardrail. North Carolina and Missouri followed Texas, passing new maps in fall, 2025. California then responded; in November, the stateโs voters approved a constitutional amendment to counter the Republican actions.
This weekend is the unofficial start of summer, and summer and early fall weather can induce disasters in this state. Weโll look at the hurricane threat to all of Virginia, not just the coasts.
Coasts. Hurricanes get the most press and preparations on the coasts.
Hampton Roads homeowners expect the occasional hurricane, and our low-lying geography draws our attention, but our official regional evacuation plans are a mystery to most here.
(Hampton Roads area) EVACUATION ROUTES If officials order an evacuation for your area, use one of these designated routes. Become familiar with these routes and plan to leave early to avoid major traffic delays. PENINSULA ยป Interstate 64 West ยป Interstate 664 North ยป U.S. Route 17 North ยป U.S. Route 60 West ยป Route 143 During severe weather, the Jamestown-Scotland Ferry is removed from service and should NOT be considered part of your evacuation plan. SOUTHSIDE ยป 264 West and Interstate 64 Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel ยป Interstate 664 North Monitor Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel ยป U.S. Route 17 North ยป U.S. Route 58 West ยป U.S. Route 460 West ยป Route 10 West The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel is NOT an evacuation route. For closure information, visit www.cbbt.com.
Fortunately, the emergency routes for Peninsula and Eastern Shore residents and visitors are intuitive, if undoubtedly in the event choked with vehicles. ย But good luck to those of us in the Southside. ย Evacuation from here will prove to be the biggest shuffling of a deck of a million motor vehicles in state history. ย EASTERN SHORE All Eastern Shore residents will use U.S. Route 13 North toward Salisbury, Maryland
“Leaving early” means departing before a hurricane’s landfall is forecast.
Far less predictable and historically more deadly in the Commonwealth are river and mountain flooding.
Maybe it isn’t Justice Kelsey that needs to be worried in 2027, but a coalition of Virginians sick and tired of Dan Helmer’s lust. For power. Of course.
Delegate Dan Helmer (D-bag) in his natural habitat. Also โ 11 stripes on the flag?
by Shaun Kenney
Who is this magical โweโ Dan Helmer is talking about? Have the Democrats already decided that Kelsey must go? Are Democrats seriously contemplating a palace coup against Virginiaโs judiciary branch? Who else knows about this conspiracy? Who is the ringleader of this conspiracy? What do people think the reaction across Virginia will be if Justice Kelsey is punished for not obeying the Democratic Partyโs political desires?
Questions we ought to be asking โ but arenโt.
Questions we would be asking if a Republican threatened a Virginia Supreme Court justice like this โ but arenโt.
My antipathy for Helmer knows few boundaries. Not just that the man is wrong, but I can only have so many individuals come and talk to me about Helmerโs โreign of shameโ in Richmond and elsewhere that you begin to observe the old Virginia dictum: a gentleman does not lie, cheat, or steal nor do they associate with those who do.
Helmer is not a gentleman โ and let that carry all the insinuation and odium one might conceive.
Fairfax Countyโs school board members are scheduled to vote today on the fiscal year 2027 $4.1 billion budget. Although there will be a $197 million increase in funds from last year, district leaders are still pointing to what they describe as a $28 million โbudget gap,โ referring to the countyโs Board of Supervisors not transferring FCPSโs full requested amount.ย (Editor’s note: the School Board adopted the budget last night, a 5.0% increase over 2026.)
Rather than addressing administrative bloat, district leadership is shifting resources away from classrooms to close the so-called โbudget gap.โ A Freedom of Information Act request revealed that FCPS spent $272 million on salaries for 2,346 non-school-based administrators in fiscal year 2026. Meanwhile, the district plans to reduce school reserve staffing by $8.8 million, eliminating 70 positions, which raises serious concerns. As class sizes increase in Fall 2026, some grades may require additional teachers, but reducing reserve staffing will limit flexibility to respond to enrollment shifts and will ultimately contribute to larger class sizes and reduced instructional support.
Increasing administrative spending while simultaneously cutting school-level resources and increasing class sizes raises serious concerns about fiscal priorities. And a 36% increase in the superintendentโs salary since 2019, as shown in the table below, has not coincided with improved student outcomes. In fact, since 2019, Fairfax County Public Schoolsโ average SAT score has declined by 35 points.
Dan Helmer as the Incredible Hulk with rage face. Image credit: Grok
Poor Dan Helmer.
No one wants to be a member of Congress more than this 44-year-old man, yet so far heโs been unable to win a Democrat primary election.
Not for lack of trying.
For the time being, heโll have to be content with his seat in the House of Delegates representing the 40th District. Small potatoes compared with Congress.
It must be frustrating. On paper, Helmer has it all: West Point grad, Rhodes Scholar, Army vet.
And yet, the voters in Virginiaโs 10th Congressional District just arenโt into him.
He tried to get the Democrat nomination in that blue district in 2018, but lost to Jennifer Wexton who went on to serve until 2024 when an illness forced her to step down.
In 2024 Helmer lost the Democrat primary to Suhas Subrananyam, who is presently serving in Congress.
Helmerโs hopes soared when Virginia Democrats cooked up their illegal referendum that would redraw congressional districts across the the commonwealth. Thatโs when the infamous 7th Lobster District was born.
One of the claws of the lobster reportedly included Helmerโs neighborhood.
At last! Helmer had a congressional district carved out just for him. Continue reading.
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger vetoed an expansion of collective bargaining rights last week. Her allies in the labor movement werenโt pleased.
Photo credit: Governor of Virginia’s webpage
Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanbergerโs rejection of a new law expanding collective bargaining rights for teachers has led to a division in the stateโs Democratic coalition. It also generated discontent with a figure thought to be among her partyโs future national leaders.
Last Thursday, Spanberger vetoed legislation that would have allowed public school teachers, among other public-sector employees, to form unions and negotiate over their wages and working conditions throughout Virginia. At present, those workers can organize only in localities that opt into such arrangements; those number fewer than 20 of the stateโs 133 city- or county-level governments.
Many of the governorโs supporters in labor were outraged by the decision, calling it a โbetrayalโ of a key constituency. One of the largest unions in the state, the Virginia Education Association, endorsed Spanbergerโs campaign almost a full year before last fallโs election, putting their membership of more than 40,000 teachers and school personnel behind a high-profile effort to retake the governorโs mansion from Republican control.
VEA President Carol Bauer referenced her organizationโs efforts in an interview with The 74, calling the veto โa great disappointment.โ
โOur members campaigned for Gov. Spanberger on the promise that she supported workers, supported affordability, and supported collective bargaining, and we were hopeful,โ Bauer said. โWe had every indication she was going to sign a collective bargaining bill.โ
A transportation infrastructure built around the primacy of bicycles works OK for the Dutch, but Virginians would never accept it.
by James A. Bacon
Amsterdammers love their bicycles. They ride their two-wheelers in the sun, in the drizzle and in the rain. They bedeck them in flowers and deck them out with baskets. Like the Inuit who have words to distinguish between different types of snow, the Dutch have an elaborate vocabulary to describe bicycle accessories, such as kinderzitje (child seats), fietskar (bike trailers), and bakfiets (large boxes mounted in front of the rider that carry groceries, children, or anything else that fits).
According to CoPilot AI, there are about 800,000 bicycles in Amsterdam, a city of roughly one million inhabitants, compared to maybe 400,000 automobiles. The city is a dream come true for smart growthers. In the city’s historic district, bicycles exceed cars in the streets at any given time by prodigious numbers, and both are outnumbered by the swarm of pedestrians.
A pedestrian/bicycle-centric society is a desideratum of the green, zero-carbon future. Amsterdam, Copenhagen and some smaller European cities are held up as models to be emulated in the United States. Whether Amsterdam’s bike-centric model could be replicated in Virginia, however, is doubtful. Whether anyone in an American city would even want such a transportation system is questionable.
A bicycle-centric transportation network is not traffic nirvana. CoPilot notes that there were more than 5,000 traffic accidents in Amsterdam in 2022, about half of which involved bicycles. I know about that from personal experience. (More on that in a bit).
Then there’s a factor that no one ever talks about: bicycles trash up the landscape. Those 800,000 bicycles have to be stored somewhere. Usually outdoors. The city has endless, long racks of them. And they are ugly…. as in uuuuugly. Amsterdam would be a much more beautiful city without them.
Justice Arthur Kelsey of the Virginia Supreme Court was the author of the recent decision in which the Court struck down the recently approved constitutional amendment regarding redistricting.ย Justice Kelseyโs current 12-term on the Court will expire next January.ย To continue on the Court, he would have to be re-elected by the General Assembly to a new term.
Del. Dan Helmer (D-Fairfax) was quoted in the Virginia Political Newsletter as saying, โWe will make sure that Justice Kelsy does not serve anymore come this January.โ
That is an outrageous statement. It smacks of Donald Trumpโs campaign of retribution against legislators and other officials who disagree with him.
Del. Dan Helmer (D-Fairfax)
If the decision and opinion of the Virginia Supreme Court were blatantly partisan, that would be grounds for not electing Kelsey to another term.ย But the decision was not partisan. It rested on perfectly sound reasoning:ย an โelection,โ in the modern sense, is comprised of more than one day. It is the means whereby citizens register their choices for candidates or questions on the ballot. In Virginia, the process in which citizens can register their choices, i.e. an election, runs from 45 days prior to Election Day, the last day on which they are able to cast a ballot, to noon on the third day after Election Day, the time period in which registrars may receive and count mailed-in ballots postmarked on or before Election Day.ย
Democrats want to have their cake and eat it, too.ย On the one hand, they want to argue that the language in the Virginia Constitution referring to the โnext general election of members of the House of Delegates,โ relating to the adoption of amendments to the constitution, refers to Election Day.ย On the other hand, they want to argue that casting of ballots in an election does not have to occur on Election Day to be valid.ย They canโt have it both ways.
It was a divided decision.ย Three Justices of the Court disagreed, arguing that the โnext general election of members of the House of Delegatesโ means Election Day. That is the nature of the judicial process; reasonable people can disagree. It is a matter of which argument is the most persuasive to most of the members of the Court.
Democrats could have avoided this situation.ย They could have adopted the redistricting amendment the first time last August or September, before early voting began, instead of waiting until the last of October, a few days before Election Day.
Now, they are claiming that the Court has overturned the โwill of the people.โย However, it was the Democrats who argued to the Court in proceedings before the referendum process got underway that precedent required it to wait until the referendum was over before it issued a ruling.ย See https://www.vacourts.gov/static/opinions/opnscvwp/1260127.pdf.ย In the end, the Court did not rule on the substance of the proposed amendment, but on the process by which the amendment was put before the people.ย It found that the General Assembly did not follow the process laid out in the constitution for amending it and, thus, the referendum itself, not the changes that would have been effected by the referendum, was invalid.ย Process is important in a democracy.
The Democrats in the General Assembly rolled the dice and lost.ย Now, they are calling for vengeance. It is unbecoming.
Is there a creative solution that would preserve the historic site of Powhatan’s birthplace while allowing development to proceed? Or will this become a zero-sum game like everything else in our society?
Press release from the Southern Environmental Law Center:
Today Preservation Virginia named the site of WaHลnSeNaKah (Powhatan)โs birthplace one of Virginiaโs most endangered places of 2026.
Located on the north bank of the James River immediately downstream from present Richmond, Powhatanโs birthplace is depicted as a prominent settlement on historic maps and initial archaeological work has uncovered tens of thousands of artifacts at the site. The site holds immense cultural significance to Virginiaโs Tribes and reflects a long-standing and ongoing relationship between Tribal Nations and the landscape. The property was later home to a plantation and enslaved community and it is recognized as the site of Richmondโs surrender at the end of the Civil War.ย ย
Today, it is one of the last undeveloped parcels near Richmond on Route 5/Old Osborne Turnpike โ one of the oldest roads in the state and designated as a Virginia Byway for its high aesthetic and cultural value. It is also in danger of being lost to development.
The US fertility rate hit a record low in 2025. But fertility rates vary significantly across states, ranging from under 1.4 children per woman in states like Vermont and Oregon to over 1.9 in Nebraska and South Dakota. IFSโsย Family Structure Indexย found that housing affordability explains 25% of this variation in total fertility rates, rising to 31% when outliers California and Hawaii are excluded. Expensive housing suppresses fertility by creating budget constraints, shifting young families into smaller housing, and driving theย migrationย of families to more affordable areas. IFS senior fellow Lyman Stone offers one solution to the fertility decline: buildย family-friendly housing.
Note: Judging from the chart above, Virginia is slightly below the trend line, with fertility rate and housing costs as a ratio of prime-age adult income both in the middle of the pack nationally.
The meltdown over the Virginia Supreme Court striking down Democratsโ illegal gerrymandering shows how far they’ve fallen from America’s constitutional foundations.
by Jacon Grandstaff
The childish meltdown Democrats have had in reaction to the Virginia Supreme Courtโs striking down their unconstitutional gerrymandering shows they donโt know much about our republican form of government or simply donโt support it.
Virginia Democrats tried to flip Virginia’s congressional map from a 6โ5 Democratic advantage to an egregious 10โ1 split before the 2026 midterms.
On May 8, the State Supreme Courtย ruledย that the General Assembly violated the constitutional procedure to submit the proposal to voters.
Stop calling them โteen meet-upsโ or โteen takeovers.โ Those terms downplay whatโs going on.
Iโm talking, of course, about the violent mobs of young people that spontaneously appear, wreak havoc and then disperse, looking like extras from the disturbing 2013 movie โThe Purge.โ
Meanwhile in deep blue Norfolk, Virginia
Hopefully the DOJ steps in and stops these teen takeovers terrorizing communities as Democrat-run cities do nothing pic.twitter.com/23OjdzESQI
Letโs call them what they are: Rioters. The barbarians involved should be cuffed and booked. If they really ARE teens, their parents should be hauled into court along with them and charged with child neglect.
That most certainly didnโt happen Sunday night in West Ghent when a mob of uncivilized people descended on an intersection. They were driving like maniacs and setting off fireworks. One of these โteensโ brought out a flamethrower and set the street on fire.
The list of laws this crowd broke are as long as Leviticus. Continue reading.
This author has just noted that Louise Lucas’s cannabis stores in Portsmouth and Norfolk, both raided by the FBI last week, are not registered with the Virginia Cannabis Control Authority.
Perhaps they do not have to register. The Portsmouth store advertises Vape cartridges and tincture oil, not medical marijuana.
But one of the featured reviews of her The Cannabis Outlet in Portsmouth is perhaps untimely:ย
I am not sure about the past but currently, this is a very good store. Lots of very strong strains. I love this place! I get what I want, when I want it. – Jeff Childers May 18, 2024
We and the FBI are left to wonder whether Mr. Childers obtained “very strong strains” of the vape cartridges or the tincture oil.
The year: 2075. The American colonies on the Moon are getting restless under Washington’s tyrannical rule….
This second edition of “Dust Mites” has a snazzy new cover, includes helpful lunar maps, and is 5,000 words tighter than the original. The sequel, “Trogs,” is scheduled for publication this summer.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
About
Bacon’s Rebellion is Virginia’s leading politically non-aligned portal for news, opinions and analysis about state, regional and local public policy. Read more about us here.
Fund the Rebellion
Shake up the status quo! Your contributions will be used to pay for faster download speeds and grow readership. Make a one-time donation by credit card or contribute a small sum monthly.
Can’t wait until tomorrow
For your Bacon’s Rebellion fix?
Enter your email address to receive immediate notifications of new posts by email.
SUBSCRIBE
Search Bacon’s Rebellion
Categories
Archives
The Jefferson Council
Protecting Thomas Jefferson’s Legacy at the University of Virginia
Forgot Your Password?
Shoot me an email and I’ll generate a new password for you.
