ATLANTA – The Georgia Senate’s Republican majority released a new congressional map for the Peach State Friday aimed at creating an additional Black majority district as ordered by a federal judge.
The proposed map, which the General Assembly will begin considering next week, would radically alter the 6th Congressional District the GOP-controlled legislature drew two years ago, part of a map U.S. District Judge Steve Jones ruled in October violates the Voting Rights Act.
The current 6th District, represented by Republican U.S. Rep. Rich McCormick, is a white-majority district stretching from East Cobb County and North Fulton County north through all of Forsyth and Dawson counties and part of Cherokee County.
The redrawn 6th District would have a Black-majority voting-age population. It would include portions of Cobb and Fulton counties that are predominantly Black as well as eastern Douglas and northern Fayette counties, areas with fast-growing Black populations.
The proposed map also makes huge changes to Georgia’s 7th Congressional District, which currently includes most of Gwinnett County and northeastern Fulton County, areas with large concentrations of people of color, including Hispanics and Asian Americans. The district currently is represented by Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath.
Under the new map, the 7th District would be taken completely out of Gwinnett County. Instead, it would include North Fulton County; all of Forsyth, Dawson, and Lumpkin counties; and western Hall County, all heavily white areas.
McBath campaign manager Jake Orvis released a statement shortly after the map was released criticizing the proposal.
“Georgia Republicans have yet again attempted to subvert voters by changing the rules,” Orvis said. “We will look to the ruling from Judge Jones in the coming weeks before announcing further plans.”
The redrawn 6th District, which McBath represented until legislative Republicans drew the current congressional map two years ago, would again appear to be friendly turf for the Democrat. After the 2021 redistricting, McBath decided to run in the 7th District instead and defeated fellow Democratic Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux in last year’s Democratic primary before winning the seat.
On the other hand, the proposed 7th Congressional District would appear to suit McCormick. He ran in the old 7th District in 2020 but lost to Bourdeaux. McCormick then shifted to the 6th District following the 2021 redistricting and won the seat.
Members of the U.S. House are not required to live in the districts they represent.
The remainder of Georgia’s 14 congressional districts would be left largely unchanged under the Senate’s proposed map, with some exceptions.
Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s 14th district in Northwest Georgia would lose southwestern Cobb and move instead into northwestern Cobb. Residents of predominantly Black southwestern Cobb objected when they were placed in conservative firebrand Greene’s district two years ago.
Georgia House Speaker Jon Burns, R-Newington, embraced the Senate’s congressional map on Friday.
“This map meets the promise we made when this process began: it fully complies with the judge’s order, while also following Georgia’s traditional redistricting principles,” Burns said. “We look forward to passing this fair redistricting plan.”
ATLANTA – The Republican-controlled General Assembly passed new legislative district lines Friday over Democrats’ objections that they don’t comply with a federal court order that found maps lawmakers drew in 2021 violate the Voting Rights Act.
House lawmakers passed a new House map 101-77, voting along party lines. The state Senate followed suit, adopting a new Senate map 32-23 in a nearly party-line vote. The only Republican who voted against the Senate map, Sen. Mike Dugan, R-Carrollton, said he didn’t like either the GOP map or an alternative presented by Democrats.
In an October ruling, U.S. District Judge Steve Jones ordered the legislature to draw five additional Black-majority districts in the House and two additional Black-majority districts in the Senate to accommodate increases in Georgia’s Black population in the last decade.
On Friday, Republicans said their new maps honor Jones’ ruling.
“My primary goal is simply to comply with the judge’s order,” said Sen. Shelly Echols, R-Gainesville, who chairs the Senate Reapportionment and Redistricting Committee.
“It does not tell Judge Jones we know better than he does,” added Rep. Rob Leverette, R-Elberton, Echols’ House counterpart, referring to the House map. “It follows his order.”
But Democrats said Republicans failed to create the seven additional Black-majority districts the judge ordered.
House Minority Whip Sam Park, D-Lawrenceville, said the House map actually creates a net of three Black-majority districts rather than five because it took away two of those districts in DeKalb and Gwinnett counties. In both cases, the changes were made for partisan gain, he said.
“This map is an undemocratic exercise of gerrymandering that harms the people’s ability to elect candidates of their choice,” Park said.
Democrats also objected to the House map pairing four sets of incumbents in the same districts, including three sets of Democrats and only one Republican pair.
Leverette said the court order left Republicans no choice but to pair incumbents in order to create five additional Black-majority House districts.
“I wish we didn’t have to do this,” Leverette told his House colleagues. “I would not propose something I thought would harm any of you unless I had to to comply with the court order.”
On the Senate side, Sen. Sally Harrell, D-Atlanta, said Republicans strayed beyond the areas in the southern end of metro Atlanta that Jones ruled violate the Voting Rights Act in order to protect GOP incumbents.
“This map works harder at protecting Republicans than fixing the problem,” she said.
Democrats also warned the new legislative maps will end up in court because – like the 2021 maps – they still violate the Voting Rights Act.
“Passing the (Senate) Republican map will only lead to more litigation and waste taxpayer money,” said Senate Minority Leader Gloria Butler, D-Stone Mountain.
The two legislative maps now move across the Capitol for the Senate to consider the House map and vice versa. The General Assembly’s special redistricting session will continue next week with lawmakers facing a Dec. 8 deadline set by the court to finish their work.
ATLANTA – The Georgia House and Senate redistricting committees approved new district lines for their respective legislative chambers Thursday, in keeping with a court ruling that the current district maps violate the Voting Rights Act.
On the second day of a special session of the General Assembly to take up redistricting, the committees’ Republican majorities voted in favor of the proposed maps while minority Democrats opposed the changes.
The maps comply with a decision U.S. District Judge Steve Jones handed down in October calling for the legislature to create two additional Black-majority state Senate seats and five additional Black-majority seats in the Georgia House.
But Democrats and redistricting watchdog groups complained Thursday that the Republican-drawn maps alter more districts than would have been necessary to comply with Jones’ order.
Janet Grant, co-chair of the organization Fair Districts GA, said the Republican Senate map would put 14.4% of Georgia’s population in different districts, compared to just 8.4% under an alternative Senate map Democrats presented to the redistricting committee.
“The court order can be met without broad disruption,” she said.
Sen. Elena Parent, D-Atlanta, said the Democratic alternative map would move roughly 100,000 Black voters who don’t currently live in Black-majority districts into districts where they would have an opportunity to elect candidates of their choice, compared to just 3,000 Black voters under the GOP map.
But Republican members of the Senate committee said the Democrats’ map was aimed at partisan gain. While the Republican-drawn map could be expected to return the current mix of 33 Republicans and 23 Democrats to the Senate, the Democrats’ map likely would result in the Democrats gaining two seats, said Sen. Bill Cowsert, R-Athens.
“You ended up making a partisan map,” Cowsert told the Democrats.
Democrats made similar complaints about the GOP-drawn House map. House Democratic Leader James Beverly, D-Macon, presented a Democratic alternative that would change boundaries in only 23 House districts, compared to 56 districts under the Republican-drawn map.
Democrats conceded the GOP House map would comply with the court order by creating five additional Black-majority House districts. But Bryan Sells, a lawyer representing the House Democratic Caucus, said the Republican map also would increase the white population in two districts that – while not currently majority Black – have enough people of color to elect a minority candidate.
Republicans on the committee pointed out that the Democratic alternative map would create only four Black-majority districts, not the five the court order requires.
Sells responded that the Democrats’ map would create a fifth “opportunity” district with sufficient minority population to elect a minority candidate.
“The Voting Rights Act does not require majority-Black districts,” he said. “The Voting Rights Act requires districts in which Black voters have an opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice.”
But Rep. Rob Leverett, R-Elberton, the House committee’s chairman, said he would not be comfortable failing to fulfill the letter of Jones’ ruling by not creating five additional Black-majority districts.
“I am leery of construing a judge’s order in a way that could lead me to jeopardy,” he said.
The two Republican maps now move to the full House and Senate, which are likely to vote on them on Friday.
ATLANTA – Georgia’s on-again, off-again gasoline tax suspension is back off.
Gov. Brian Kemp and the General Assembly allowed the latest temporary suspension to expire on Wednesday. That means the state Department of Revenue will resume collecting 29 cents per gallon from motorists.
Kemp reinstituted the temporary suspension in September. Since then, prices at the pump have fallen to an average of $2.79 in Georgia, third-lowest in the nation according to AAA.
With Georgia sitting on a huge budget surplus, the state has been to afford temporarily suspending the gas tax. But with prices dropping so significantly, the governor and legislature opted not to continue the suspension at this time.
ATLANTA – A legislative study committee recommended Thursday that the state step up its investment in public fishing areas as a way to discourage trespassing on private property.
The House Study Committee on Fishing Access to Freshwater Resources held several hearings around the state in October as a follow-up to legislation the General Assembly passed in March guaranteeing Georgians the right to fish in navigable portions of the state’s rivers and streams.
Senate Bill 115 was introduced after a property owner along a stretch of the Flint River known as Yellow Jacket Shoals banned fishing from the bank on its side of the river. While the measure drew enthusiastic support from sportsmen’s groups, its language left unclear what constitutes a navigable river or stream and what does not.
The study committee recommended Thursday that the state address that issue by determining the navigability of each river and stream in Georgia.
“That was a huge sticking point for many of our property owners,” said House Majority Whip James Burchett, R-Waycross, the committee’s chairman.
Riverfront property owners who testified during the committee’s hearings complained of people traipsing through their properties on the way to and from fishing holes, leaving trash and becoming a general nuisance.
To address that issue, the study committee recommended increasing penalties for trespassing while maintaining the core of Senate Bill 115 intact.
“We want to make clear where our fishermen can fish in the state of Georgia … (but) have a stiffer penalty for trespassing,” Burchett said.
To make fishers less tempted to trespass, the panel recommended additional investment in the state’s public fishing areas. The committee’s report acknowledges the growth of fishing in Georgia, particularly in the trout streams of the North Georgia mountains.
The report now moves to the full state House of Representatives for consideration during the 2024 legislative session starting in January.
