The main beneficiary of the Supreme Court redistricting ruling: Ben Cline

Ben Cline set up an entity he called Stop the Gerrymander, and organized it as a 501(c)(4), which doesn’t have to disclose its finances, so, god knows how much the oligarchs gave him for what Cline styled as a “grassroots” effort to save his job in Congress, which pays him a mere $174,000 a year.

For Cline, who told Cardinal News when he set up Stop the Gerrymander in March that it would “spend what it takes to get the job done,” since it wasn’t his money, he can consider it money well spent.

I mean, sure, he lost the actual April 21 referendum, which saw 1,604,276 Virginians vote “Yes” in favor of new congressional district maps that would have put Cline into a new Democrat-majority Sixth District.

But it’s pretty clear now that the strategy behind the scenes was to have the MAGA-majority Supreme Court of Virginia go ahead and allow the referendum to proceed, because if the Democrats lost the referendum vote, man, would that have been embarrassing – but if the “Yes” votes won out, well, the Supremes were there as the firewall.

---

ICYMI

• Four Virginia Supreme Court justices white out 1,604,276 ‘Yes’ votes
• Two of the MAGA justices that overruled 1.6 million of us signed their own career death sentence

---

I mean, mad respect – and then, icing on the cake, the timing of the Supreme Court of Virginia decision coming down, a day after Tennessee used the U.S. Supreme Court vote from just last week that allows MAGA states to redistrict to gerrymander out a Black Democrat, seriously, chef’s kiss on the message from all of this, which is:

We can do whatever we want to do.

“This is the correct decision, and it was always going to end up this way,” Cline said in a statement on Friday, which I’m sure he didn’t mean to let us in on their dirty little secret – that this was a done deal from the get-go.

“Democrats broke laws that they helped write in the first place, blew through deadlines, wrote a biased and misleading ballot question, and lied to the voters in all of their advertising to support the referendum,” Cline went on in his victory-lap statement.

“The voters of Virginia banned gerrymandering six years ago, and that ban remains in effect today. This is a great day for fair elections and the rule of law, and it’s a great day for the Commonwealth of Virginia,” Cline said.

“The voters of Virginia banned gerrymandering,” indeed – even though the Trump Court gave license to Tennessee, Florida and Louisiana to gerrymander the sh-t out of their states without giving their taxpayers a chance to vote up or down on their schemes.

Cline, of course, is mum on that part of things, though if I’m him, I’d cut right to the heart of it, with a statement along the lines of:

Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, boo, boo – we can do whatever the f–k we want to …

Rub it in there real good, you know.

I wouldn’t want to be Rob Wittman or Jen Kiggans on the other side of the state, because even with their districts going back to the original 2021 lines, they’re still going to lose.

And Beth Macy, god love her, she’s going to do her best to give Cline a run for the oligarchs’ money here in the Sixth, but.

We’ve already seen that his money marks will “spend what it takes to get the job done.”