Kudos to Bill Howell.

Last week, the Republican Speaker of the House recognized the Senate’s amendments to House Bill 529 for what they were—a power grab, pure and simple.

Declaring the amendments "not germane" to the original bill, the Fredericksburg legislator went against members of his own party in the Virginia Senate who attempted to sneak in a radical redistricting plan, packing minority voters into a few select Senate districts, while increasing Republican influence in others. Redistricting is a deliberate process normally done after the decennial U.S. Census, not in a last-minute, opportunistic rush.

On Jan. 21, while Sen. Henry L. Marsh III (D-Richmond) was in Washington, D.C., attending the presidential inaugural, his Republican counterparts took advantage of Marsh’s absence to redraw Senate boundaries. Voting along party lines, they pushed through the measure 20-19, tacking it onto a bill originally intended to make minor technical adjustments to le...