“VA GOP Speaker”
I can’t believe that bastard. What was he thinking?
Well, to be fair, he has a responsibility to determine whether an amendment is germane to the original bill (as required by the VA Constitution), and thie Senate amendment was quite a stretch. He probably ruled against it because Gov. McDonnell and several House Republicans didn’t want to have to decide between approving Senate lines that benefitted Republicans (which were, in my opinion, fairer than the Dem-drawn gerrymander, and which added a black-majority SD) and being accused of (gasp!) partisanship and of participating in an underhanded scheme to wait until a black Democrat went to Sobama’s inauguration to pass the bill by one vote.
McDonnell could have come out in favor of the map, pointing out how it’s fairer than the current one, and maybe then the Speaker would have ruled that isince the subject of the original bill was legislative redistricting that the amendment was germane enough, but McDonnell just wanted the “problem” to go away.