Preston Bryant is a Republican who has represented Lynchburg and part of Amherst County in the Virginia House of Delgates since 1996.

A lot has been said and written of late about the special election that's to be held in November to fill the vacant 39th district state senate seat.

The vacancy was created when Sen. Madison Marye, a populist Democrat from mountainous Montgomery County in southwestern Virginia, abruptly resigned the office he'd held since 1973. Normally, a longtime politician's mid-term retirement wouldn't draw much attention, apart from the fact that it's coming before it normally would. Here, though, Marye's early exit has drawn considerable interest -- not so much the retirement itself, but the timing of it.

You see, Marye resigned at a curious juncture. He announced his resignation in early summer, saying that he'd be gone officially on Aug. 1. And, oddly, the special election necessitated by his leaving comes just as the General Assembly is transitioning after its decennial reapportionment from old districts to new districts.

So the awkward-but-critical question that arises, at least in the minds of a few, is this: In which district, the old or the new, should the special election to fill the vacancy be held?

More to the point, since senators are not up for re-election until 2003, should this 2002 special election be held in the old district that's being vacated or in the new district? Let' s not forget that the new districts became "law" when the governor signed his name to them on April 21, 2001.

And further complicating the matter is that the new 39th district is not in and around Marye's native Montgomery County. Given southwestern Virginia's undeniable loss of population over the last decade, and given Northern Virginia's explosive population growth, the new district is -- by numbers and law -- necessarily a world away in Northern Virginia. It's in parts of Fairfax and Prince William counties.

So, is there an apparent answer to the question of where to hold the special election to fill the now vacant 39th district state senate seat? Well, yeah, there is.

In fact, four times already that question has been answered. There have been three special senate elections and one special house election since the new districts were decided -- and in each case, the special election was held in the newly drawn and reapportioned district.

The first was held in the new 14th senate district when Randy Forbes, a Chesapeake Republican, left his Senate seat after winning a special election to Congress. The second came in the new 25th senate district upon the untimely passing of Charlottesville' s Democratic state Sen. Emily Couric. And the third and fourth were held just last month, one in the new 37th Senate district and the other in the new 89th House district, when their respective incumbents, Republican state Sen. Warren Barry of Fairfax and Democratic Del. Jerrauld Jones of Norfolk, were lured from their posts to take high-dollar positions in the Democratic administration of Gov. Mark Warner.

Despite these four special elections being held in the newly configured districts, questions are still being raised as to the propriety of what's being done to fill the 39th district vacancy. Which is the proper place -- the old district or the new -- to hold the special election? And who's being disfranchised, if anybody, wherever it' s held?

And as life goes in law and politics, when such sticky situations as this arise, one first turns to the law. If that' s unclear, one sometimes turns to the attorney general for guidance. And if it' s still unclear -- or if some just don' t like the AG' s answer -- then it all falls to the courts for resolution.

Which, for some reason, is where things are now regarding the 39th district state Senate seat.

Democratic campaign consultant and part-time political columnist Paul Goldman apparently is upset that the special election for the 39th district is being conducted in the same way all the other special elections have been. Specifically, he's mad that it' s being held among the asphalt and concrete in Fairfax and Prince William counties and not in and around Montgomery County' s green mountains, which is where the district has been situated for as long as even the 76-year-old Marye can remember. And Goldman seeks to lay blame for this at the feet of Republican Attorney General Jerry Kilgore.

Goldman, never one to forego a good fight, has persuaded Marye and a couple other plaintiffs to file a lawsuit challenging the venue of the special election. The argument centers on an April 2001 legal opinion by former Attorney General Mark Earley regarding where special elections should be held when falling, like this one, in the time-warped period following reapportionment but before regularly scheduled elections.

In that opinion, Earley said that the special election must be held in "the new district that most closely approximates the old district" that was vacated by the original officeholder.

But the problem here is what "approximates" means. If you're Goldman, it's apparently a geographic term. For the point of the lawsuit, it seems, is to keep the seat in southwestern Virginia. However, if you re any of those who ran in the four special elections held since the redrawn districts became the law, it's pretty clear that "approximates" centers on the one-man, one-vote rule.

The sad fact of the matter is this: the old 39th district no longer exists. It's not anywhere in southwestern Virginia. It vanished and reappeared in Northern Virginia on account of the principles of proportional representation -- that's what we call one man, one vote -- that constitutionally underpin the reapportionment process.

So the district that now "most closely approximates" the old 39th is necessarily in Fairfax and Prince William counties. After all, that' s where the people are. And it' s people -- how many there are and where they live -- that define where districts go.

All of which gets us back to Goldman' s beef with Kilgore. First, let it be understood that Kilgore has never written an opinion on this subject. The attorney general -- a proud, proud son of southwestern Virginia, one who was born, raised, and educated in yonder hills -- only advised Warner' s office on his interpretation of the law.

It was Warner -- that' s right, Warner -- who in late July proclaimed to the world in the formal language of his office that "a vacancy has occurred in the Senate of Virginia from the Thirty-Ninth District, composed of the Counties of Fairfax (part) and Prince William (part), occasioned by the resignation the Honorable Madison E. Marye" and set the special election for November 5th in none other than those Northern Virginia counties.

Huh? The governor put Fairfax and Prince William and Madison Marye all in the same sentence, linked as though they belong to each other? Yep.

Obviously, Warner himself -- a man who has never hesitated to disagree with the attorney general over redistricting matters -- recognized that the 39th district no longer exists where it once did. If Warner had taken the Goldman line and ignored the one-man, one-vote constitutional principle, he' d certainly have broken with Kilgore and hired his own counsel -- perhaps, say, an expert in voting rights from a top-notch California law school -- to represent him as he took the case to the state's highest court.

Alas, Warner did none of that. He's not a party to the Goldman-inspired lawsuit seeking to define what new district would "most closely approximate" the old 39th. (That suit, by the way, is currently sitting in a Montgomery County court, though a motion has been filed to move it to Richmond.)

As for Marye, he's a bit like Goldman, never one to pull back from a brawl and always adept at getting his name in the papers. Politicians and their hacks are natural-born self-promoters. They have to be. Else, the politician becomes extinct and the hack irrelevant. Goldman, who has learned a thing or two from his mentor, Doug Wilder, knows how not to become irrelevant.

Soon, though, Marye will settle in on his Montgomery County cattle farm and realize what he' s known all along -- that life' s a lot easier and quieter now that he' s not traveling the truck-filled Interstates to and from Richmond. He' ll be perfectly content with the hum of his tractor. This lawsuit will be but a memory, remembered for little more than being his last hurrah.

And perhaps Goldman will visit him. They can sit on the porch and watch the sun set and talk about battles gone by. And as they look out over the old 39th, you can bet that Goldman will be assessing which far-off hilltop would be best for building his next quixotic windmill.

Your thoughts?

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