Georgia Republicans approve new map that protects their advantage in state’s congressional delegation

(CNN) — Republicans who control the Georgia legislature on Thursday finalized a new congressional map that safeguards their party’s dominance in state politics and dashes, for the time being, Democrats’ hopes of adding an additional US House seat.

Critics of the court-ordered map, approved in a special legislative session, argue it defies parts of a federal judge’s decree to boost Black political power in this swing state and predicted further legal challenges even before the final vote.

Republicans have defended the map as fully compliant with the order issued in October by US District Judge Steve Jones after he found the state’s existing district lines violated the Voting Rights Act. GOP Gov. Brian Kemp signed the new map – and two state legislative maps, which preserve his party’s majorities in the Georgia House and Senate – into law Friday, meeting a court-imposed deadline to draw the new district lines.

Politicians in Washington are closely monitoring redistricting moves in Georgia and several other states around the country because these maps could determine which party controls the US House of Representatives after next year’s elections. Republicans currently hold a slender majority in the chamber.

The new Georgia congressional map complies with Jones’ order to establish an additional Black-majority district but preserves the GOP’s 9-5 edge in its US House delegation. The map targets Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath’s Atlanta-area district by moving it farther into Republican territory.

“It is a fair map for the people of Georgia,” Republican state Rep. Matt Reeves said Thursday, shortly before the state House voted 98-71 to approve the congressional plan, the final step before sending it to Kemp’s desk.

But Democratic state Rep. Sam Park said the new map amounted to open defiance of Jones’ order and described it as reminiscent of some Republicans’ refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 election.

“It is self-evident that the Republican Party’s primary goal is to maintain power at all costs,” he said.

Jones, who will determine whether new lines comply with his order, has scheduled a December 20 hearing on the maps.

Parallels to Alabama?

The congressional map approved in Georgia creates a new Black-majority congressional district in the western Atlanta metropolitan area as ordered by Jones. But it dramatically reshapes the multiracial district held by McBath, a Black congresswoman who rose to prominence as a gun safety advocate.

Critics have accused Georgia officials of following the lead of Alabama, where Republicans who control the state legislature initially ignored a federal court mandate – affirmed by the US Supreme Court – to create a second Black-majority congressional district or “something quite close to it” to comply with the Voting Rights Act.

(The high-profile confrontation ended with a federal court creating a new Alabama map that contained two districts with substantial Black voting-age populations. The new lines will be in effect for the 2024 election. Alabama officials, however, have vowed to continue to fight the map’s use in future elections.)

Democrats see a parallel in Georgia.

The Georgia maps “are arrogantly drawn to avoid accountability for patently clear and deliberate violations of the Voting Rights Act and to make impossible fair and lawful representation to the people of the state,” Eric Holder, a former US attorney general who chairs the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said in a statement this week.

He accused Georgia GOP lawmakers of using “decades-old tactics” of “ignoring the courts in order to force discriminatory policies onto the people.”

Georgia state Rep. Rob Leverett, a Republican who chaired a House redistricting committee, said Thursday it was a “low blow” for critics of the map to compare the state’s actions with those of lawmakers in neighboring Alabama.

“We have not thumbed our nose” at the judge, Leverett said.

New legal fronts

The controversy over the Georgia maps comes amid a raft of new legal challenges – and some setbacks in recent weeks for voting rights groups and Democrats – over redistricting.

Late last month, for instance, a three-judge panel of the 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that private entities cannot bring lawsuits under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.  Lawsuits from private citizens and interest groups have helped enforce government compliance with the landmark civil rights law, and the 8th Circuit’s ruling runs counter to decades of legal practice.

The 8th Circuit panel affirmed a 2022 ruling by a Trump-appointed federal judge in Arkansas that held that only the US Justice Department can bring Section 2 lawsuits.

The vast majority of cases brought under the Voting Rights Act are done so by private plaintiffs, with the DOJ facing strained resources and other considerations that limit the number of such cases it files to, at most, a few each year.

The issue is expected to end up before the US Supreme Court to resolve. Currently, the ruling only applies to the seven states under the 8th Circuit’s jurisdiction.

But Republican state officials in Louisiana – now under a federal court order to draw a new congressional map that creates a second Black-majority district by January 30 – have asked another appellate court, the 5th US Circuit, to consider whether Voting Rights Act lawsuits from private litigants should be tossed out in their state and others covered by that court.

It’s an outcome sought by conservative groups, who have praised the 8th Circuit’s decision, concluding that Congress did not specifically allow for a so-called private right of action in the text of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 or in subsequent updates to the law.

“It’s never too late to get something right,” Jason Snead, executive director of the conservative Honest Elections Project, told CNN.  “Congress knows how to create a private right of action and didn’t do that here.”

Meanwhile, the redrawn congressional lines in Georgia – along with an ongoing legal battle over a map governing county seats in Galveston, Texas – could spark fresh legal disputes over the future of multiracial coalition districts.

In his ruling ordering the creation of an additional Black-majority congressional district in Georgia, Jones wrote that the Voting Right Act violation he found could not be corrected “by eliminating minority opportunity districts elsewhere” in the state.

McBath, for instance, was elected last year from a district where Black, Asian and Latino residents collectively make up the majority of voters but no single racial or ethnic group predominates. That district would no longer exist under the map approved Thursday.

In all, the new Georgia congressional map creates four Black-majority districts, up from two, and reduces multiracial districts from three to one. It leaves in place nine majority-White districts, which likely would preserve the current number of Republican seats, given voting patterns in the state.

Charles Bullock, a political scientist at the University of Georgia and an expert on redistricting, said the map appears to buck Jones’ admonition to lawmakers against eliminating so-called minority opportunity districts.

He said that could prove risky for the Republicans who control the Georgia General Assembly because it could prompt Jones to order a special master to create new maps, not just for the US House seats, but for legislative districts now drawn in a fashion that largely protects sitting state legislators.

A special master won’t necessarily “pay any attention to where incumbents live,” he said. “That would make a number of Republicans unhappy.”

Future legal challenges over the new Georgia map could turn on whether majority-minority districts like the one McBath currently represents have the same legal protections under Voting Rights Act as those where a single racial group forms the majority.

Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, maintains that breaking up multiracial districts does not violate the Voting Rights Act.

“I think Georgia took the right approach here,” he said, noting the four Black-majority congressional districts under the new map, including one specifically mandated by Jones.

“What the state is doing now is complying to the letter of what Judge Jones ordered them to do,” Kincaid said. “The fact that the plaintiffs are unhappy with that shows they are not suing to create more majority-Black districts.”

“They are suing to create more Democratic districts,” he said, “and the Voting Rights Act is not a vehicle for trying to get the federal courts to partisan gerrymander in your favor.”

Park, the Democratic state lawmaker from Georgia, said Thursday that in breaking up multiracial districts Republicans are trying to lay the groundwork “to narrow the protections of the Voting Rights Act.”

The GOP is saying “multiracial coalitions can and should be divided and conquered,” Park said. “What a shame.”

This story has been updated with additional information.

CNN’s Dianne Gallagher contributed to this report.

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