Holder-Led Group Challenges Georgia Redistricting, Claiming Racial Bias

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/03/us/eric-holder-georgia-redistricting-racial-bias.html

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A Democratic group led by the former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. has accused the State of Georgia of flouting the Voting Rights Act, claiming that Georgia Republicans reshaped two state legislative districts to minimize the electoral influence of African-American voters.

Mr. Holder’s group, the National Redistricting Foundation, is expected to file suit in Federal District Court in Atlanta on Tuesday. The complaint charges that race was the “predominant factor” in adjusting two districts — the 105th and 111th — in the Atlanta area where white lawmakers had faced spirited challenges from black Democrats.

Both districts were drawn in 2015, through an unusually timed redistricting law that the lawsuit claims violated the Voting Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment.

Mr. Holder said Georgia’s district map was a “particularly egregious” case of racial gerrymandering, aimed at restraining the political clout of Atlanta and its suburbs. With the redistricting measure, Mr. Holder said, Republicans had brought about the “silencing of the state’s approximately three million or so African-American residents.”

The Atlanta area, Mr. Holder said, is “becoming a lot more competitive, and they, through this mid-cycle redistricting, made the determination that this was something that was threatening to them.”

The lawsuit will also assert that Republicans improperly failed to draw a legislative district in the Atlanta area that would have been likely to elect a black candidate. It asks the court to invalidate the legislative districts and mandate the creation of “at least one additional majority-minority district in the Atlanta metropolitan area.”

Republicans have typically defended themselves against claims like Mr. Holder’s by insisting that the redistricting was conducted with partisan motives in mind, rather than racial ones. The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Tuesday in a Wisconsin case that may determine whether there are legal limits on partisan gerrymandering.

Both the Georgia and Wisconsin suits are part of a broader strategy on the part of Democrats to challenge Republican control of the process by which districts are drawn for state and federal elections in many states. After their sweeping victories in the 2010 elections, Republicans redrew legislative maps around the country to shore up their power in Congress and state capitals.

As a result, it is now exceedingly difficult for Democrats to bid for control of legislative bodies in a long list of states, including Georgia, even as the voting population in some areas has grown more diverse and potentially more open to Democratic appeals.

Mr. Holder and several other Democratic leaders, including the House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi of California, and Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, formed the National Democratic Redistricting Committee to help finance legal challenges to the Republican-drawn maps.

The Georgia suit will be the first that Mr. Holder’s group, an affiliate of that committee, will have filed on its own, though the group has joined litigation brought by allied organizations in other states.

The Georgia map is also being challenged in a separate lawsuit backed by the state N.A.A.C.P.

Democrats have had mixed success against Republican-drawn redistricting maps. A federal appellate court ruled against a Republican map in Texas, finding that it discriminated against minority voters, but the Supreme Court declined to force the state to redraw its districts before the 2018 elections, and is expected to hear an appeal. A Supreme Court decision in May, finding that North Carolina Republicans engaged in racial gerrymandering, prompted only a minimal revision of that state’s political districts.

Mr. Holder said the accumulation of court rulings was encouraging to his cause, but he acknowledged that the Supreme Court’s refusal to void the Texas map before the 2018 elections was a setback.

“I’m obviously disappointed by what the court did there,” Mr. Holder said, noting that lower courts had found blatant racial gerrymandering in effect. “That system will stay in place, potentially through the next cycle, and I think that’s problematic.”