Virginia Leader Dismisses Plan to Undo Court Ruling While Dems Try A Hail Mary at SCOTUS

This is your TPM evening briefing.

May 11, 2026

As Virginia Democrats take their map fight to the U.S. Supreme Court, Virginia Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell (D) is flatly rejecting Democrats’ reported musings about how to undo the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision overturning a recently passed redistricting amendment.

Surovell told a local journalist and The New Republic similar things on Monday: that there isn’t enough time to redraw maps before the state’s August primary, and that forcing the Supreme Court justices into early retirement — the most ambitious part of the reported plan — is too radical.

(I’m appending an asterisk to all of this; if the might of the national Democratic Party descends on Surovell, he may cave. Should he resist, he could get Bill Fergusoned.)

The timeline argument is pretty hard to swallow, given Louisiana’s suspension of its primaries (and tossing out of 42,000 votes) and Alabama and South Carolina’s attempts to do the same.

As to the “too extreme” piece — if Democrats refuse to rig the system in the states they control, even while southern states triumphantly wipe Black representatives off the map, what are voters meant to think? That unilaterally respecting norms is more important than protecting minority voters? That leaving a conservative court in charge of a blue state is more of a priority than stripping President Trump of a trifecta for his last two years? That uprightness trumps winning?

Democrats cannot both pound the alarm about the existential threat to democracy and also refuse to use what power they have to reverse the authoritarian slide. Virginia will be a critical early data point in determining whether Democrats will have the stomach to salvage democracy should they win control in 2028.

TPM’s Kate Riga and Josh Marshall Join Heather Cox Richardson’s American Conversations

Supreme Court Allows Access to Abortion Pill to Continue for a Few Days

Justice Samuel Alito extended his administrative stay Monday evening on a 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that would reimpose in-person dispensing requirements on mifepristone, restricting providers from sending it by mail.

Red states — including Louisiana, the plaintiff in this case — have targeted mailed mifepristone since Dobbs, when it became the primary way that women in abortion deserts were able to get care.

The new expiration date for the stay on the 5th Circuit ruling is Thursday at 5 p.m. ET.

It’s a fairly short extension, and makes me wonder whether it might be to give time for justices to write dissents. This is all going down on the shadow docket, so no one has to write at all. But if the conservatives reimpose restrictions while the case plays out, the liberals will likely have something to say about it.

AOC for President?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) got The Question at a Chicago event with Obama world’s David Axelrod: What’s your response to people who want you to run for president or Senate?

Her answer caught fire online (starts around 1:05 in this CSPAN recording):

“What’s funny about that is that they assume that my ambition is positional. They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat. And my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country.

Presidents come and go. Senate, House seats, elected officials come and go. But single-payer healthcare is forever, a living wage is forever, workers’ rights are forever, women’s rights, all of that. A finer point to your question is that when you aren’t attached, right, when you haven’t been fantasizing about being this or that since the time you were seven years old, it is tremendously liberating because I get to wake up every day and say, ‘how am I gonna meet the moment?’ And conditions change radically all the time.

…The great thing about that is no billionaire can stop that. No concentrated level of power, no elite, no gatekeeper can prevent me from doing everything I can, waking up every day in service of the working class. And I can do that in the House, I can do that in the Senate, I can do it from the White House, I can do that from a shack in upstate New York chopping wood and being a burnout, I can do it from anywhere.”