Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is officially joining the GOP’s push to reinstitute Jim Crow governance after conservative Supreme Court justices opened the door to racist gerrymandering with their decision in the Callais v. Louisiana case.
On Wednesday, Kemp — who has signed multiple voter suppression laws in recent years — called for a special legislative session in an effort to gerrymander his state’s congressional districts ahead of the 2028 elections. The map would take effect after this year’s midterms.
Kemp, notably, has been floated as a potential presidential candidate in 2028. His announcement comes as other Republican governors have eagerly pressed conservatives in their states to rig their congressional maps in their favor, now that the Supreme Court has effectively allowed them to draw majority-Black districts out of existence.
Next month’s special session will mark the third time in five years that Georgia Republicans will attempt to gerrymander their map, a remarkable data point underscoring the GOP’s illiberalism in the state.
These repeated returns to the well were rebuked by the Georgia state Senate’s minority leader, Harold Jones II. In a statement on X, he said in part:
If Republicans ever used their power to help Georgians, they wouldn’t have to waste time and money redrawing the maps every few years to keep their majorities.
June will be our third redistricting since 2021. Republicans need to undo their last gerrymander because it wasn’t good enough to keep their waffling political party in power. Most parties would try out some new ideas. Republicans choose to strip political power from Black people and undo the progress the South made in the last 60 years.
Jones also noted that Black people make up Georgia’s largest bloc of middle-class and working-class voters, adding: “When Republicans strip Black people’s political power away, it doesn’t just strip one community of power. It strips political power from every single middle and working class person and hands it over to billionaires and big corporations.”
As the Southern Poverty Law Center explained in January, Georgia Republicans forced through a map in 2021 that voting rights activists said discriminated against Black voters. After a federal court struck down that map, Georgia Republicans replaced it with a different map in 2023 that has been similarly criticized.
And now — amid what some people fear could be the largest purge of Black lawmakers from Congress since the Jim Crow era — Kemp is planning yet another assault on Black political power.
And he’s not stopping there. Just a day prior to calling the special session, Kemp signed a law to make elections for district attorneys and other offices nonpartisan in five Atlanta counties where Democratic DAs are in charge, all of whom are Black women.
As writers Jeff Singer and David Nir explained in The Downballot, this change, which is being challenged by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, could make it easier for Republicans to flip these five offices.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.