A swath of voters in U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Georgia district have keen hopes that a recent anti-gerrymandering ruling will release them from her district, according to a new report.
Black voters in southwest Cobb County — lumped into Greene’s 14th Congressional District by state Republicans in 2021 — hope to win next year a representative who shares their views and values their constituency, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
“I’m totally embarrassed that she is my representative,” Deborah Douglin told AJC. “Gerrymandering has got us stuck with somebody who absolutely, in no shape or form, represents who I am, what we think or what we would want.”
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Voters like Douglin are pinning their hopes on Judge Steve Jones’s October ruling that the Republican-controlled Georgia Assembly violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by disenfranchising black voters.
State lawmakers have been given until Dec. 8 to rework Georgia’s 14 districts until at least five have Black voter majorities, court records show. Among the districts whose borders must be redrawn is Greene’s.
While Cobb County GOP chairperson Salleigh Grubbs described Greene as “very popular” to the Atlanta Journal-Constititution, voters in Austell and Powder Springs said they stay away from her functions “because of her controversial comments."
Those comments include accusations of racism after President Joe Biden vowed to nominate a Black justice to the Supreme Court, arguments that Muslim Rep. Rashida Tlaib — whom Greene tried and failed to censure this week — wasn’t really a member of Congress because she made no oath on a bible — and that Black people should feel “proud” of Confederate monuments because they symbolize progress.
Elliott Hennington, the Black Powder Springs resident who served as plaintiff in the Georgia map challenge, told Atlanta Journal-Constitution he feels Greene ignores voters like him.
“She hasn’t come to speak to her constituents to see what we need or desire,” Hennington said. “I’m not being represented if I don’t get a chance to (talk to) my elected officials.”
Read the full report here.
