Well, they went ahead and did it: The Republican-controlled Georgia legislature has approved a congressional re-redistricting plan aimed at imperilling two Democratic incumbents and making a GOP incumbent safe.
Democratic observers have mixed assessments about the impact of the remap, which tosses freshman Rep. John Barrow’s Athens home into an adjoining district and lowers the African-American and Democratic population of Rep. Jim Marshall’s district significantly. Barrow has already made it clear he’ll run in his “old” district, which remains Democratic-leaning, and Marshall (who might wind up running statewide anyway) has easily dispatched a strong and well-funded Republican challenger two elections in a row.
But Democrats will mount a legal challenge to the remap anyway, arguing that the dilution of the minority vote in Barrow’s district and in that of Republican Rep. Phil Gingrey violates the Voting Rights Act.
More immediately, the Georgia action, on the heels of the much more egregious re-remap in Texas in 2003, is almost certain to let slip the dogs of war by making re-redistricting a viable option for either party when it obtains control of the legislature and governorship of a state after the regular decennial redistricting process. Indeed, Democrats have threatened retaliatory action in three states (Illinois, Louisiana and New Mexico) where they’ve gained total control since ’01, though Illinois Dems have apparently decided otherwise and time’s running out for a re-remap in Louisiana.
But the GOP Power Grabs will definitely give added impetus to ballot initiatives that would combine a new system for redistricing with an immediate reconsideration of the last round. There’s already an initiative campaign underway in Florida, where ’04 Senate nominee Betty Castor has lent her name and some serious cash to the effort. And I gather something similar is likely to happen in Ohio. Along with PA and MI, these two states witnessed the most successful GOP partisan gerrymanders of 2001. More famously, Arnold Schwarzenneger’s proposed initiative in California would produce an immediate re-redistricting there as well, though the partisan implications are hard to predict (though engineeered by Democrats, the California map’s main characteristic was incumbent protection).
In other words, we had all better get ourselves educated and interested in the murky law and politics of redistricting, and figure out a national model that makes sense. Like a lot of people, I’d prefer that we not lurch into this on a chaotic, state-by-state basis full of potential partisan mischief, but thanks to our Republican buddies, I don’t think it’s any longer possible to put this particular genie back in the bottle.
