Wednesday, December 5, 2001
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Wednesday, December 5, 2001 |
| Westmoreland:
Politicians, voters 'lost in space'; outcome uncertain
By DAVE HAMRICK
What voters will be faced with in Georgia's 2002 elections is anybody's guess at this point, state Rep. Lynn Westmoreland told a gathering of concerned citizens in Fayette last week. Westmoreland represents part of Fayette and is the state House minority leader. He is traveling the state conducting town hall meetings to explain to local Republicans, and anyone else who shows up, how he views the effects on each county of this year's reapportionment of state House and Senate and U.S. congressional districts. Republicans have challenged the newly drawn districts, asking the U.S. Department of Justice to overturn them, based on racial discrimination provisions of the federal Voting Rights Act. Gov. Roy Barnes has filed suit asking a federal court to direct the Justice Department to conclude its investigation of that challenge quickly, ruling in favor of the new districts or, failing that, to render its own decision quickly so the matter can be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in time for next year's elections. In its answer to the suit, DOJ says it simply doesn't have enough information to rule yet. "If [the court case] is not finished by the election, the courts may draw a temporary map" for use in the 2002 election, Westmoreland told the local crowd. Having spent two hours in a deposition with DOJ lawyers last week, Westmoreland said he wasn't overly optimistic that the new district maps will be overthrown. "I asked one of the lawyers who he represented, and he said, 'I represent you.' So I said, 'Then help me overturn these maps,'" Westmoreland told the crowd with a chuckle. He said the lawyer laughed and said, "I can't do that." Republicans are claiming that the new districts are not only unfair to Republicans, but also to minorities. But Westmoreland said he has been unable to find a lawyer who can give him a set of criteria for determining that. The legal term used is "retrogression," he said, adding that the term means "you can't have less minority participation than before" the reapportionment. "It's going to be up to an individual judge's discretion" to define the terms, he said. Republicans claim that one effect of the governor's suit is that it precludes comment by individual citizens, because in order to comment on the redrawn districts, a person would have to become an intervenor in the lawsuit. Citizens had no input before the maps were drawn, Westmoreland charges, because the maps weren't presented until the day they were approved in a party-line vote. The lawsuit in effect prevents any citizen input into the Justice Department deliberations, he said. Meanwhile, political maneuvering takes place at each potential candidate's own risk at this point, Westmoreland said. Some lawmakers, whose districts were redrawn so that they no longer lived in them, have moved so they can continue to run for reelection, he said. But if the newly drawn districts are overturned, those moves will have been in vain, and the lawmakers will be on the wrong side of a one-year residency requirement if they then try to move back into the old districts. "We're kind of out there lost in space," he said.
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