The Republican-controlled Georgia General Assembly didn’t merely abandon its plans for redrawing racially-gerrymandered congressional districts, it did so to the applause of radical leftists. And the Peach State RINOs basked in the far-left approbation.
Marshall Yates, strategic counsel for the Oversight Project’s Redistricting and Election Protection for American Integrity and Representation (REPAIR) Initiative, said the legislature ought to be ashamed.
Georgia Speaker of the House Jon Burns, a Newington Republican, looked pretty shameless in announcing on Wednesday that House Republicans would not be taking up congressional or legislative redistricting maps for 2028 during the General Assembly’s special session. He smiled and nodded as Democrats holding “Hands Off Georgia” signs cheered.
“Yeah, well, thank you for the ovation,” Burns said, looking quite pleased with the applause and himself.
‘The Georgia Way’
Effectively defying the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais that effectively put an end to affirmative action districts, Republican lawmakers held a well-staged press conference to tell Georgians they had no time to take up map redrawing. They did so despite Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s proclamation last month convening the special session for the explicit purpose of redrawing Georgia’s unconstitutional majority minority districts.
Burns told his new leftist friends that House Republicans “knew it was not the right path forward for our state at this time.”
“We believe that it is important to do things the Georgia way — responsibly, transparently, and with ample opportunity for public input,” the speaker said at the Capitol event surrounded by his Republican colleagues.
The decision, it appears, was more of a fearful reaction than a noble gesture, which was performative and ignoble in a republic still striving to end discrimination. Some Georgia Republicans feared redistricting in an election year could backfire, driving Democrat turnout in competitive races, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
So, Burns and crew apparently don’t feel an urgent need to fix long-standing discrimination in Georgia’s political maps. That would seem to be at odds with the high court’s majority opinion, written by Associate Justice Samuel Alito, that noted “lower courts have sometimes applied this Court’s §2 precedents in a way that forces States to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.”
‘Inaction is not a Defense, it’s Pathetic’
The REPAIR Initiative is urging Georgia’s legislative leadership to reverse course and do the necessary work of redistricting in the special session or commit to do so in a near-term special session.
“The Georgia General Assembly ought to be ashamed. Their cowardice will go down as one of the biggest blunders following the Callais decision,” Yates said in an exclusive statement to The Federalist. “Georgia lawmakers were called to Atlanta for exactly this purpose, but instead they immediately surrendered to the radical racial agitators.”
Yates previously told The Federalist that the REPAIR initiative is an “all-of-the-above approach” to fighting to ensure states — blue and red — are no longer drawing affirmative action maps tainted with the Voter Registration Act’s stain of discrimination.
That is exactly what the U.S. Supreme Court ordered in Louisiana v. Callais. The decision specifically dealt with Louisiana’s court-ordered creation of a second majority-black congressional district. That lower court found that Louisiana’s original congressional map, which only contained one majority black district, more than likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Despite their Capitol clapping, Democrats quickly shrugged off the Republicans’ ingratiating act.
House Minority Leader Carolyn Hugley and Senate Minority Leader Harold Jones II in a joint statement called any effort to get rid of the long-standing affirmative action districts “racist” and “rigged.” They complimented leftist organizations for “showing up and showing out” enough to make Georgia House Republicans cower and cave.
“Fight now, vote Republicans out in November, and stop these racist, rigged maps for good,” the lawmakers said.
Other red states — Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Tennessee — are redrawing their congressional maps in compliance with the Supreme Court ruling.
There’s much more work to be done.
Yates estimates there are somewhere north of 100 race-driven districts across the country. California appears to have more than a dozen alone — Hispanic majority-minority districts squeezed together as part of the state’s mid-decade map manipulation.
“Inaction is not a defense, it’s pathetic. By refusing to fix Georgia’s congressional districts, the Georgia General Assembly has surrendered to the radical racial activists who benefit from the status quo,” Yates said. “Surrendering to the left doesn’t make the redistricting problem go away, it only empowers Hakeem Jeffries, Marc Elias, and Eric Holder.”
