The Republican leaders of the Georgia House of Representatives and Georgia state Senate said Wednesday that they will not redraw Georgia’s political maps during the special legislative session that started on Wednesday.
“We are confident that Georgia will prevail in the pending appeals and look forward to receiving additional judicial opinions to assist us in our future map-drawing efforts,” House Speaker Jon Burns and the rest of the House leadership team wrote Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp in a letter.
“Changes to Georgia’s maps should take place only when members of the General Assembly and citizens have been given ample opportunity to gather the facts, provide input, and engage in meaningful discussion,” they added. “For this reason, we will not be taking up congressional or legislative redistricting for the 2028 election cycle during this special session.”
In a statement issued Wednesday afternoon, Senate President Pro Tem Larry Walker said the Senate similarly sent a letter to Kemp saying it would not take up redistricting during the special session.
“We believe it is prudent to allow the judicial process to continue developing in other states and to carefully evaluate how courts rule on newly adopted district maps across the country. With this guidance, we are confident that Georgia’s new districts will ultimately withstand legal scrutiny and that Georgia will prevail in defending its position in court,” he said.
“Because any revisions to Georgia’s congressional or legislative districts would not take effect until the 2028 election cycle, we believe it is both appropriate and responsible to approach this process deliberately rather than rush it. Our responsibility is to ensure that any action taken on redistricting is transparent, well-informed and coordinated with our colleagues in the House of Representatives,” he added.
Georgia was the next Southern state where Republicans were convening to redraw voting districts in ways that could diminish the political power of Black and other nonwhite voters after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted Voting Rights Act provisions that helped shape existing boundaries in racially diverse states.
The General Assembly convened Wednesday in a special session called by Kemp in response to the court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, which struck down Louisiana’s congressional map as an illegal racial gerrymander.
Kemp, who is in the final months of his second term, deviated from other governors who fast-tracked new congressional maps for the November midterms partly in response to President Donald Trump’s pleas to shore up the party’s chances at maintaining control of Congress. Kemp instead wanted Georgia lawmakers to draw districts for the 2028 elections. Yet the governor moved ahead of his Southern counterparts by asking the Republican-controlled Assembly to redraw its own boundaries, as well.
That would make Georgia the first state to apply Callais to its legislature and demonstrate the cascading effect of the high court’s decision across Southern states with the nation’s highest proportions of Black voters and Black lawmakers.
The issue is especially salient in Georgia, where the Capitol complex includes a statue of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and sits blocks from where the slain civil rights icon lived, preached and led the movement that yielded the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
Still, neither Kemp nor Republican legislative leaders had unveiled proposed changes as of Wednesday morning.
Conservative justices gave the green light
Before Callais, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was understood to require maps — for Congress, state legislatures and local legislative bodies — that gave historically marginalized minorities a reasonable chance to select candidates of their choice. Nationally and in Georgia, those so-called “opportunity districts” have disproportionately elected Black and other nonwhite representatives.
For example, about a third of Georgia’s 180 state representatives are Black. Latino, Asian and other minorities bring the total nonwhite share to about 40% — roughly reflecting the state’s overall population. Georgia’s U.S. House delegation has five districts out of 14 total where the electorate is majority or plurality nonwhite. All elected Black Democrats in 2024.
With the Callais ruling, issued earlier this spring, a conservative majority of justices concluded that jurisdictions drawn with racial makeup in mind are discriminatory and violate the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause. The justices declared that apportionment should be “race neutral.”
Their stated reasoning did not hinge on party interests, and federal courts have said partisan gerrymandering is constitutionally permissible. But in Southern states, especially, party loyalty dovetails considerably with race and ethnicity. So the decision has allowed Republicans — a party dominated by white people — to redraw maps to goose likely GOP districts by redistributing nonwhite voters who tend to support Democrats.
That, many civil rights activists and experts argue, makes it impossible for Southern legislatures to be genuinely “race neutral” when drawing boundaries.
Emory University professor Carol Anderson compared Callais and the resulting redistricting push to poll taxes and literacy tests imposed by white Southern conservatives — and blessed by the Supreme Court — during the Jim Crow era.
“They used racially neutral language for policies that were clearly racially targeted,” said Anderson, who is also a board member of Fair Fight Action, a group organizing against the Georgia redistricting.
There are risks for Kemp and Republicans
It’s not guaranteed that Georgia Republicans can get what they want from new maps.
Partisan gerrymandering involves redistributing voters — packing certain citizens into fewer districts or dividing them across more districts. Around metro Atlanta, spreading nonwhite, Democratic-leaning voters across more districts could make more seats seem to lean Republican. The risk, however, is that more battleground districts emerge because white metropolitan voters are trending less conservative, which could give Democratic candidates of any race or ethnicity more chances to win.
That’s perhaps not a major factor in the Georgia state Senate, which already is considered gerrymandered for Republicans. But it could be a consideration when drawing state House and U.S. House maps.
Kemp is effectively asking Republicans, especially in metro Atlanta, to redraw their own boundaries and take on new, unfamiliar territory.
Trump started the fight before the Supreme Court decision
Nationally, a partisan redistricting battle started last year when Trump urged Republican-controlled states to redraw congressional boundaries to shore up the GOP’s narrow House majority in Washington this November. Texas answered the call first.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democrats in Sacramento answered with their own gerrymander that voters later approved. A succession of states followed. The outcome would have been close to even had the Virginia Supreme Court, controlled by conservatives, not struck down new Democratic-drawn maps approved by the state’s voters. All told, Republicans think they could gain as many as 16 seats from their redistricting efforts while Democrats think they could gain six seats from new districts in California and Utah.
That still may not be enough for the GOP to hold a congressional majority, given Trump’s lagging approval ratings. But it could mitigate Democratic gains and set Republicans up well for 2028 and beyond.
WABE’s Patrick Saunders contributed to this report.
