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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, Slate’s politics newsletter that can’t wait to play its weekly pickup water polo match in Trump’s new “American flag blue” Reflecting Pool.

We’d give the politics this week a solid B . The new Fed nominee looks like he’ll be confirmed, even though he’s not sure who won the 2020 presidential election. The FBI director is suing a magazine. People continue to die in Congress.

Let’s begin with a double blast of hot, hot, HOT redistricting-war updates.

A win that Democrats needed—and for more than just the seats.

Democrats scored a hard-fought, messy, and vital win this week in the Virginia redistricting referendum, which will likely give the party four new House seats in the state and bring it to parity with—or even give it an advantage over—Republicans in the midcycle redistricting arms race that the White House initiated last year. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who poured a lot of time, money, coordination, pressure, and campaigning into the outcome, was understandably gloating following the result. He spoke of how he warned Speaker Mike Johnson last year that this gambit, which began when Texas redistricted last year, would backfire, as it now has. And he issued further warnings to Florida Republicans, who meet next week to consider new maps. “Our message to Florida Republicans is, ‘F around and find out,’ ” he said at a press conference Wednesday. This followed his Tuesday night statement, which concluded with a promise of “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

The Virginia win was about more than just picking up the seats. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, Democrats in Congress have been squeezed between a base that insists they fight at every turn—and as dirty as need be—and the cold, hard reality that there’s not much they can do from the minority beyond a performance of fighting. The Virginia gerrymander was the sort of gloves-off retaliation against Trump that the base has been fantasizing about, and the biggest win of Jeffries’ still-early tenure as Democratic leader. Now it just needs to stand up in court.

Blairymandering under duress!

Dig just past the layer of outrage and cries of unfairness from Republicans following the Virginia result, and you’ll discover kernels of introspection. Republicans in the House and Senate were openly griping about the White House’s pursuit of midcycle gerrymandering now that they may come out the worse for it. “We have to understand that for every action, there are second- and third-order effects that we could live to regret,” Arkansas Rep. Steve........

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