Unfortunately, the report is in the subscription-only Roll Call today, but here’s the dish: Georgia Republican legislators have agreed on a re-redistricting of the state’s Congressional districts that’s basically designed to mess with two Democratic incumbents and shore up a vulnerable Republican incumbent.Freshman Dem Rep. John Barrow’s home county of Clarke (Athens) is moved out of his district, though his staff makes it clear he’ll run for re-election in the 12th anyway. Interestingly enough, the map-drawers managed to actually increase the African-American percentage of the voting age population in the 12th while reducing its Democratic performance level. That’s because Athens (home of the University of Georgia) probably has more white Democrats than any city in the state. Still, it remains a majority-Democratic district, and it’s hard to call Barrow a carpetbagger when the carpet’s actually been pulled out from under him.More serious damage was done to 3d District (central-west central GA) Rep. Jim Marshall, whose district goes from 40% African-American to 33%, with Bush having won 58% of the 2000 vote (the measure of GOP performance since the population figures are from the 2000 census) in the new map as opposed to 52% in the old. Since Marshall waxed Calder Clay, a well-funded and hand-picked GOP challenger in 2004, by a 63-37 margin, Georgia Dems think he should be able to hold the district. But it’s worth noting that the home of former Congressman Mac Collins, who lost the GOP Senate nomination in ’04, has been quietly slipped into Marshall’s district, which may mean Collins is considering a comeback.Meanwhile, 11th District (northwest GA) Rep. Phil Gingrey would get a district radically reshaped in his favor, with the African-American population dropping from 28% to 12%, and Republican performance being boosted from 51% to 64%. This is no huge surprise, since the 11th was originally designed as a very competitive district. And while I wouldn’t want to call the Gentleman from the 11th a wingnut or anything, it is rumored he has to wear special weights to keep him from keeling over on his right side while walking.The lawyers who follow this sort of thing think the Power Grab will probably survive Voting Rights Act scrutiny, because its authors were careful to avoid any direct impact on Georgia’s four African-American House incumbents. But there’s a possible legal hook in the murky doctrine of “minority-influence districts,” wherein the Voting Rights Act can be violated if action is taken to dilute a high if not majority percentage of minority voters, which arguably is the case with both the Marshall and Gingrey remaps.According to Roll Call, some Georgia Dems are reportedly relieved that the re-redistricting was not as drastic as some had feared. Perhaps the threat of retaliation elsewhere had a mitigating effect. But the principle of the thing remains outrageous, and for my money, Democrats should wheel out the lawyers and write up the talking points to fight it.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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January 26: Republicans Can’t Specify a Debt-limit Ransom
It’s one of the more comical aspects of the deadly serious game of chicken that House Republicans are playing on the debt limit, but it’s worth pointing out, as I did at New York:
As the United States lurches toward a possible debt default thanks to House Republican hostage-taking on legislation needed to extend or suspend the debt limit, it’s increasingly evident that (as my colleague Jonathan Chait observed) the hostage-taker is strangely reluctant to name a ransom. Indeed, the initial Democratic strategy in this complicated chess game was simply to force House Republicans to say exactly what kind of spending cuts they propose to make in exchange for allowing a debt-limit measure to wobble its way to Joe Biden’s desk.
It’s easy to mock GOP lawmakers for the brainlessness, or maybe cowardice, of their effort to make Democrats identify the spending cuts their opponents want. The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell tans the elephant’s hide with considerable panache:
“Republicans have Very Serious budget demands. Unfortunately, they can’t identify what any of those demands are.
“They say they want to reduce deficits — but meanwhile have ruled out virtually every path for doing so (cuts to defense, cuts to entitlements, wiping out nondefense discretionary spending, or raising taxes). …
“Republicans say they want lower deficits — in fact, they have pledged to balance the budget (that is, no deficit at all) within seven or 10 years. But they have not laid out any plausible mathematical path for arriving at that destination. They promise to cut ‘wasteful spending’ … but can’t agree on what counts as ‘waste.’”
In so quickly reaching this predictable dead end in answering the world’s easiest math problem, Republicans have one plausible line of defense: It’s how much of the public feels about fiscal matters as well. They really don’t like deficits and (especially) debt. But they really don’t like the kind of spending cuts that Republicans are talking about either (tax increases, of course, are categorically off the table for the GOP and have been since the George H.W. Bush “Read my lips: No new taxes” debacle).
A September 2022 poll from the deficit scolds of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation found that Americans are up in arms about all the borrowing:
“A 31-month high of 83% of voters are urging the president and Congress to spend more time addressing the national debt, with the biggest jump among those under age 35 (8 points to 85%).
“More than eight-in-ten voters (81%) also said that their concern about the national debt has increased. Nearly three-in-four voters (74%) feel the national debt should be a top-three priority for the president and Congress, including 65% of Democrats, 74% of independents, and 86% of Republicans.”
From 40,000 feet, all that red ink looks pretty alarming, it seems. More recently, this very week, the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal found a majority of Americans stamping their feet about it:
“Most Americans oppose raising the federal debt ceiling without accompanying cuts to federal spending, a new RMG Research poll finds.
“Sixty-one percent of 1,000 registered voters in the survey said Congress should either raise the debt ceiling with spending cuts (45%) or refuse to raise the ceiling at all (16%). Only about a quarter (24%) said Congress should raise the ceiling without accompanying spending cuts.”
To House Republicans, the great symbol of runaway spending is the “monstrous” $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill passed by Congress in December. Many of them claimed during the fight over Kevin McCarthy’s Speakership bid that “the American people” were outraged by the measure despite the fact that it cleared the Senate, House, and White House. Perhaps they were thinking of a Twitter poll conducted by Elon Musk that showed that 75 percent of respondents opposed the omnibus bill.
The sad truth is, however, that the more specific you are in identifying items in one of those “monstrous” bills, the more support they command from the public. In 2021, Gallup published a summary of public-opinion research on what was then a $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Democratic budget-reconciliation proposal (soon whittled way down to $2.2 trillion and then to a net-negative figure in the ultimately enacted Inflation Reduction Act) and found that its provisions were very popular despite the debt they required:
“[S]everal recent polls … ask about the bill in a broad, umbrella fashion, and all find majority support. A Quinnipiac poll conducted July 27-Aug. 2 asked, ‘Do you support or oppose a $3.5 trillion spending bill on social programs such as child care, education, family tax breaks and expanding Medicare for seniors?’ and found 62% support, 32% opposition. A Monmouth University poll conducted July 21-26 asked about both the initial infrastructure bill and the new $3.5 trillion bill, describing the latter this way: ‘A plan to expand access to healthcare and child care, and provide paid leave and college tuition support.’ The results were similar to the Quinnipiac poll, with 63% in favor and 35% opposed …
“A progressive think tank, Data for Progress, conducted an online poll among likely voters July 30-Aug. 2, with a much more detailed 130-word description of the bill, including in the question wording a bulleted list of six specific proposals in the plan, the $3.5 trillion price tag and even a description of the ‘reconciliation’ procedure necessary to pass it. All of this (and the online mode, and the sample of likely voters as opposed to national adults) also didn’t seem to make much difference; 66% of likely voters in their sample supported the plan as described, while 26% opposed it — similar to the Quinnipiac and Monmouth results.”
So the minute you get into the particulars of Democratic-proposed spending bills, public concerns about debts and deficits tend to fade. And oh — there’s another problem for Republicans on the fiscal front: voters like the idea of higher taxes on the wealthy and on corporations to pay for popular spending measures.
The lesson for Republicans is clear: Their crusade for fiscal discipline is popular, so long as it is very general and you exclude higher taxes on the rich as a possible solution. No wonder politicians like McCarthy want Democrats to be the ones who name the GOP’s price for letting the U.S. economy get through the year without calamity.