Voting Rights Roundup: Georgia lawmaker admits GOP gerrymandered the 6th District to stop Democrats
Leading Off
● Georgia: Gerrymandering is a seedy business where legislators often go to extremes to hide their true motivations: maximizing partisan advantage for their own party. But every so often, someone on the inside will let the mask slip and acknowledge the truth. As Democrats continue to give Republicans the fight of their lives in the special election for Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, a historically Republican seat in the northern Atlanta suburbs, state Sen. Fran Millar said the quiet part out loud at a Republican breakfast meeting right before last Tuesday’s primary:
Campaign Action"I’ll be very blunt: These lines were not drawn to get Hank Johnson’s protégé to be my representative. And you didn’t hear that. They were not drawn for that purpose, OK? They were not drawn for that purpose."
Millar is referring above to Democratic nominee Jon Ossoff, who previously worked for Democratic Rep. Hank Johnson and just advanced to a hotly contested June runoff in a seat that has been Republican for decades. He’s also absolutely right: As Daily Kos Elections has demonstrated, the district’s current boundaries played an instrumental role in ensuring that Georgia Democrats hold just three congressional districts in the Atlanta area instead of the four that simple math suggests they ought to hold.
It’s also not hard to feel that there’s a racial element to Millar’s remarks: Johnson, who serves the neighboring 4th District, is African-American, while the 6th has always been represented by white Republicans. Referring to Ossoff as Johnson’s “protégé” sounds like yet another attempt to suggest he doesn’t “belong” in the 6th District. And Millar deserves no benefit of the doubt: Three years ago, he vowed to shut down early voting in DeKalb County (where part of the 6th is located) because it was “dominated by African American shoppers and it is near several large African American mega churches.”
Millar’s admission that Republicans intentionally drew the 6th District to ensure that they would win it does more than just expose the GOP’s flagrant efforts to twist the democratic process to its own benefit. It could also potentially come back to bite Republicans in court. Several major cases currently working their way toward the Supreme Court could finally result in the justices imposing limits on gerrymandering for partisan gain. By admitting what the GOP’s motivation was in drawing the 6th, Millar may have just handed opponents of gerrymandering a smoking gun.