Michael Garrett - NC Senate
Tonight, I sat down in my living room, turned on the returns out of Virginia, and watched a state I love do something I have spent my entire political life fighting.
Virginia voted to gerrymander.
And I stood up and applauded.
That sentence should not exist in America.
No state should ever have to choose between surrender and a rigged map. No governor should ever have to sign lines she knows are bent. No legislature should ever have to redraw the representation of its own people for no reason other than that another state did it first.
But that is where we are.
Tonight, the people of Virginia looked at what Texas did. At what Missouri did. At what Ohio did. At what North Carolina did. And they refused to be the only adults left at a rigged table.
They voted yes.
And I applaud them.
I have spent my entire career fighting gerrymandering. In our community. In committee. In a speech on the Senate floor against a rigged congressional map, a speech my Republican colleagues erased the permanent record.
I believe one thing, above party, above tribe, above career.
The people choose their representatives.
Not the other way around.
That belief has not moved one inch tonight.
But the ground beneath it has.
A few months ago, the leaders of the North Carolina Senate called us back to Raleigh.
Not to pass a budget.
Not to fund our classrooms.
Not to help a single family still digging out from Helene.
We came back so a president could be handed the congressional seats he said he was owed.
Owed.
Read that word again.
In America, a president is owed nothing. Not a seat. Not a district. Not a vote. Not a single inch of deference beyond the narrow authority the Constitution grants him and the trust the people choose, every few years, to renew.
A president who believes he is entitled to anything other than competing, honestly, openly, in the light, for the publicβs trust has already crossed a line the founders drew in blood.
When he orders his allies in state capitals to rig the game against the American people, to gerrymander accountability out of existence, to make the outcome of an election inevitable before a single citizen has walked into a single booth, he is not running a campaign anymore.
He is running from judgment.
And an American president who runs from the peopleβs judgment is not leading a democracy. He is running one over.
Here is the hard truth.
You do not end gerrymandering by gerrymandering. Not as a principle. Not as a first choice. Not as a long-term plan.
This disease only leaves our democracy when every state, every party, every mapmaker in every capitol puts down the pen together.
But in this moment, when only one side has been ordered by the most powerful man in the country to rig the game, when the cost of unilateral disarmament is the end of competitive elections for a generation, the only answer, the tragic answer, the one I wish to God we did not have to give, is to fight fire with fire.
Tonight, Virginia fought back.
Tonight, Virginia refused to burn alone.
If the blaze that spreads from this vote forces both parties to finally, finally put down the pen together, then maybe something real will rise out of the ashes.
I think about Jack and Charlotte every night.
I am not going to leave them a country where the map is drawn in a back room and the outcome of their vote is decided before they have learned the word ballot.
Valley Forge was not fought so a president could be handed seats.
Normandy was not stormed so district lines could be cut into the shape of one manβs ambition.
The Edmund Pettus Bridge was not crossed so the right to vote could be hollowed out from the inside by the very people sworn to protect it.
We owe those generations better.
We owe our children better.
We owe each other better.
So tonight, I applaud the people of Virginia.
And tomorrow, I stand ready, with any colleague of any party, from any state, to file a constitutional amendment banning partisan gerrymandering in all 50 states.
No more lines drawn to protect careers.
No more maps drawn to punish votes
.
No more presidents handed seats they have not earned.
Let them draw their maps.
We will draw the line.
Push.
Tonight, I sat down in my living room, turned on the returns out of Virginia, and watched a state I love do something I have spent my entire political life fighting. Virginia voted to gerrymander....
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