If you’re unfamiliar with this debacle so far, my colleagues have covered the what and the why extremely well. In a nutshell:

• Virginia Republicans had a case of epic butt-hurt after Obama took the state in November (to say nothing of yet another Democratic Senator-Elect in the form of former governor Tim Kaine).
• As butt-hurt Republicans are known to do, they hatched a nefarious scheme to rejigger the states electoral votes so districts would be awarded on an individual basis, giving the sparsely populated Western (and Republican) regions a great deal more weight against the heavily populated Northern and Southeastern (and largely Democratic) regions.
• The Virginia Senate is locked in a perpetual 20-20 tie, with the Republican Lt. Governor casting the tie-breaking votes. When it came to Gerrymandering, though, he was vocally opposed and indicated he’d never vote in favor of such nonsense.
• Rather than admit defeat, the GOP waited until a Democratic Senator was out of town in order to skew their votes. In this case, it happened to be one of the state’s foremost civil rights icons who only left to go to the second inauguration of President Obama. Classy move.
• The GOP rams the bill through the Senate, Democrats unable to stop it since they were down a man. The bill in question had been in a “continuation” cycle for some time to that point, each day getting handed off to the next. Until the GOP realized the Democrats were down a man, there was no indication that it would come to a vote soon, much less on that day in particular.