Senate passes new redistricting map

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

02/20/04

By RHONDA COOK

With the General Assembly under federal court order to draw new election districts for legislators, the state Senate passed a new map for itself today. On the same day, a federal judge in Washington decided to throw out a separate redistricting case, to avoid confusion with the more recent lawsuit in Atlanta .
 
Democrats argued that news of the pending dismissal of the case in Washington just added more confusion to an already tangled situation.
 
"It certainly muddied things up," Senate Democratic Leader Michael Meyer von Bremen (D-Albany) said today. Meyer von Bremen is one of three senators whose districts were at issue in that case, over a Senate map drawn in a special legislative session in 2001.
 
Republicans, however, said they saw that move as a victory. "This is not inside politics," Senate President Pro Temp Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) said. "This goes to the heart of America .
 
The GOP-controlled Senate today was just an hour away from passing a new map 32-23 when senators learned that one of the two cases calling into question the design of legislative districts was off the table, at least for now.
 
That case had gone to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in June that Georgia's state Senate districts did not violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The high court had sent that case back to a three-judge federal panel in Washington .
 
Recently, attorneys for the state of Georgia and for the U.S. Department of Justice asked that panel to delay taking any further action until the more recent case in Atlanta had been resolved.
 
Last week, a three-judge federal panel in Atlanta ruled that the state Senate and state House maps both violated the one-person, one-vote guarantee in the U.S. Constitution. The judges gave the Legislature until March 1 to draw new maps or said it would draw interim districts themselves.
 
The party primaries are scheduled for July 20, with qualifying for those elections to start April 26. State elections officials have testified that newly drawn districts would not give them time enough to prepare for those election dates.
 
During debate in the state Senate today, Democrats accused Republicans of being disingenuous in claiming that their newly proposed district lines respected incumbency and were blind to the politics of an area.
 
"This process has been significantly more open . . . than the process that went into this map," drawn in 2002 when Democrats controlled the Senate, Senate Reapportionment and Redistricting Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-Roswell) said.
 
"We rebuilt this state with fair maps," said Sen. Dan Lee (R-LaGrange), one of Gov. Sonny Perdue's floor leaders.
 
But Meyer von Bremen said, "The reality that we see is politics plays a major role in redistricting."
 
He acknowledged that politics played a central role in the map-drawing process in both 2001 and 2002 when his party was in charge at the Capitol.
 
And the Republicans are doing the same thing this year, Meyer von Bremen said: "To state there was no political motivation [in the new map] is an understatement. To state this was politically blind is wrong. This is a far cry from being politically blind."
 


http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/legislature/0204/20redistrict.html