Proposed Georgia congressional map would keep GOP lead while creating majority-black district

Georgia Republicans have advanced a new congressional map that would maintain the current partisan split while adding a majority-black district after a court ruled the previous map violated the Voting Rights Act.

The proposal would keep the Peach State at nine Republican and five Democratic seats for its congressional map, but it would redraw the 6th and 7th Congressional Districts in the process, which would divide Rep. Lucy McBath’s (D-GA) district.

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The plan advanced out of a state Senate committee on a 7-4 party-line vote on Monday and will be debated by the full state Senate in the coming days. Democrats, who are hoping to pick up a seat with the court-ordered redistricting, contend the new map does not comply with U.S. District Judge Steve Jones’s October order.

Jones had called for the creation of an additional majority-black congressional district to comply with section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, but he also said that the new district could not be formulated by “eliminating minority opportunity districts elsewhere.” The current 7th District, which McBath represents, has no majority racial group in it. Democrats argue that replacing that district with a majority-black district would violate the court order, but Republicans disagree.

“A minority opportunity district must be a district where a single racial group is a majority,” state Republican Sen. Shelly Echols, who serves as the chairwoman of the Reapportionment and Redistricting Committee, said on Monday, per the Associated Press.

McBath’s campaign manager Jake Orvis said in a statement on Friday that they will wait for further rulings in the redistricting case “before announcing further plans” but vowed not to let “an extremist few” end her tenure in Congress.

“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. Regardless, Congresswoman McBath refuses to let an extremist few in the state legislature determine when her time serving Georgians in Congress is done.”

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The special session the legislature is now in began on Wednesday, with new congressional and state legislative maps being at the top of the agenda for lawmakers.

State legislative maps put forward by Republicans look to minimize changes for both the state Senate and the state House leading into 2024, but with the state House maps, several incumbents would be placed in the same district.