On Monday, June 17, the United States Supreme Court released its opinion in the case of Virginia House of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill. The case sought to determine the standing of the Republican leadership of the Virginia House of Delegates in challenging a new map of the House of Delegates that was accepted by the Virginia Supreme Court after previous maps were struck down due to racial gerrymandering. Because Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring’s office chose not to pursue a legal challenge after a federal court found “overwhelming evidence” that the state had “sorted voters into districts based on the color of their skin,” violating “the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause, and because of the failure of the House of Delegates to meet thresholds to represent the Commonwealth in federal court, the SCOTUS ruling means that the newly drawn maps will apply through the 2019 elections.    Virginia’s political leaders reacted to Monday’s important decision with a number of references to the General Assembly elections this Fall. Attorney General Mark Herring (D) called the ruling a “big win for democracy in Virginia” and said that it is “good news” that the upcoming elections “will take place in constitutionally drawn districts.” Speaker of the House Kirk Cox (R), who initiated the lawsuit, released a statement lamenting that the Court did not assess the lawsuit’s arguments against the new map and said that the decision “leaves a lot of unanswered questions just two years before the next redistricting cycle.” He went on to criticize the Attorney General for not representing the state in this case, stating that if he would have “defended the law of the Commonwealth,” then the Supreme Court would have been able to decide the merits of the case.