Democrats in Virginia desperately want permission from voters to gerrymander the state beyond recognition. They also want Virginians to know how profoundly sorry they are to have to ask. “I believe that people should choose their representatives. Representatives shouldn’t choose their people,” State Senator Creigh Deeds declared on Friday, as he stood flanked by a dozen young Democrats at the University of Virginia. This is typically the main argument against gerrymandering, but for Deeds, it was just the windup to a pitch for his party to cast aside its highfalutin principles and start hurling spitballs back at Republicans. “We’ve been pushed,” he lamented, “into a situation not of our own choosing.” The situation to which Deeds so gravely alluded is the all-out redistricting war that Republicans started last summer in Texas. At President Trump’s behest, state lawmakers redrew congressional lines to bolster the GOP’s narrow House majority. Democrats, initially aghast but quickly emboldened, responded by matching Republicans with an equally aggressive gerrymander in California, which voters approved overwhelmingly in November. The battleground expanded from there, …