Augusta County moving to West Virginia? According to one dumb BOS member, sure

A dimwitted Augusta County Board of Supervisors member wants the General Assembly to redistrict the county into West Virginia.

Memo to Michael Shull: Route 250 is your way across the mountains, and there’s no doubt a wide availability of properties, probably at bargain-basement prices, considering the state of the West Virginia economy and all.

“If Richmond wants to redistrict, redistrict the whole western part and put us in West Virginia,” Shull, the elected supervisor for the Riverheads District, actually said, out loud, at Wednesday’s BOS meeting.

Shull was walking back his push from earlier in the week to get county voters to sit out the upcoming April 21 referendum on congressional redistricting, after somebody had to explain to him that telling people in a 70 percent-plus MAGA county to protest by staying home would almost certainly backfire.

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ICYMI

• Augusta County leaders debate blocking early voting in redistricting referendum

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The BOS did vote Wednesday to note its formal opposition to the proposed redistricting, which would give Augusta County not one ineffectual MAGA back-seater representing us in Congress, but actually, three seats in Congress – two in leans-Democrat districts, the third a Republican district.

Shull, obviously not the brightest star in the constellation, somehow thinks having three Members of Congress representing the county instead of one is a bad thing.

He justified his bird-brained commentary by saying Richmond is trying to “suppress our vote in Augusta County, because you’ll have somebody representing you outside of the county that don’t know anything about the people here.”

Ben Cline is the current single congressman representing Augusta County in the U.S. House of Representatives; Cline lives in Botetourt County.

Which is “outside of the county,” to borrow from Shull’s phrasing.

Cline’s home address in Fincastle is 78.0 miles from the Augusta County Government Center, per Google Maps.

The worst-case scenario for Michael Shull is: he still has Morgan Griffith, a Republican, in the Ninth District, and he may have Tom Perriello, who lives just across the mountain in Albemarle County, representing the county in the Sixth instead of Cline.

Albemarle County literally borders Augusta County.

We also, of course, border a slice of West Virginia.

Really, whichever he prefers, in terms of where he lives out his years.