John King sworn in as Ga. insurance commissioner
WASHINGTON — As states sprint through their redistricting processes this fall, many activists are learning that mapmaking commissions don’t quite address gerrymandering or minority voting protections as intended.
Most state legislatures control the map-drawing process, but a handful now have redistricting commissions of varying construction and independence with a say in line drawing. Some, like New York’s, play an advisory role, while others, like those in California and Colorado, officially set the lines.
Advocates expected redistricting commissions to take partisan favoritism out of the mapmaking process, but some maps have favored one party over the other while others have shortchanged growing minority communities. Experts have argued some bias is unavoidable in a political environment in which most Democratic voters are packed in urban areas and most Republicans live in more rural ones.
Getting commissions rather than elected state legislators to control mapmaking has taken decades of campaigning from groups such as the League of Women Voters, which backed a 2018 referendum creating a commission process in Ohio. The new process in that state and others produced some regrets though, according to the state league’s executive director, Jen Miller.
“We hoped everyone’s better angels would prevail, but what we’ve seen is a disregard for Ohio voters and Ohio’s democracy, and politicians have
ATLANTA — Former Doraville Police Chief John King was officially sworn in Friday as Georgia’s insurance commissioner.
King actually has been on the job since June 2019, when Gov. Brian Kemp appointed him on an interim basis after then-Insurance Commissioner Jim Beck was indicted on federal fraud and money laundering charges. not honored the letter or the spirit of the reform,” Miller said.
With control of Congress at stake in next year’s elections, experts expect the new set of House maps to be a determining factor in who controls the chamber come 2023 — and in most states, state legislators still oversee the process. Ten states have some form of independent commission that draws the maps, five have advisory commissions like New York’s, and another three have “backup” commissions like Ohio’s, which take over the redistricting plan if the state’s legislature fails to do so.
Reformers aiming to end partisan gerrymandering think, on the whole, commissions have helped states get to fairer maps. Joe Kabourek, the senior campaign director for anti-gerrymandering group RepresentUs, said legislature-drawn maps have been far worse for voters overall.
The group paired up with the Princeton Gerrymandering Project to grade legislative maps on partisan fairness, compactness and other measures. On average, commission states averaged a “B” grade map, while legislators have averaged a “D” grade.
“We think the proof is in the pudding on this; those commissions are producing better maps on a grading scale than the politician states, but I think it’s entirely predictable,” Kabourek said.
However, geographic polarization may prevent states like Iowa, Arizona and Michigan from drawing maps that represent the state’s overall competitiveness, according to Jowei Chen, a political science professor at the University of Michigan. He told participants at a Duke conference on redistricting earlier this year
Beck, a Republican elected to the office in 2018, was convicted last July and sentenced to more than seven years in prison in October. He began serving his sentence this week.
King, who also serves as a major general in the Georgia National Guard, is Georgia’s first Hispanic statewide officeholder.
“General King has already made great strides in restoring public trust in the agency and that other considerations in mapmaking, like splitting as few counties or municipalities as possible, may tilt independently drawn maps.
“Democrats are concentrated in urban areas, and that’s part of the political geography. Any time you produce maps that are just following county boundaries, following municipal boundaries, just following geographic compactness, there is going to be a partisan effect,” Chen said.
The Ohio redistricting commission, which met after the General Assembly failed to pass a map, blew past its deadline to adopt a plan, returning the process to the legislature. State legislators have since finalized a map that Miller said would split communities and tilt control to Republicans.
Former President Donald Trump would have carried 13 of the state’s 15 redrawn districts in 2020, although he won the state with 53% of the vote. The new map also got rid of the district of Democrat Tim Ryan, who is running for Senate, and made Democrat Marcy Kaptur‘s seat Republican-leaning.
“The maps produced by the party in power slice and dice communities like they’re chopping vegetables,” Miller said. “They don’t care about keeping communities whole or creating a map that works for voters. They only care about making sure they can keep their supermajority in Congress as long as possible.”
Virginia, Michigan and Colorado are going through the commission process for the first time after voters in those states adopted the system for this redistricting cycle. putting Georgians first,” Kemp said Friday after swearing in King during a ceremony in the Georgia House chambers. “He has dedicated his life to service, and we look forward to the positive impact he will continue to have on the agency.”
King will seek the Republican nomination next year to continue as insurance commissioner. State Rep. Matthew Wilson, D-Brookhaven, is running for his party’s nod to challenge King.
Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is still on the fence about Build Back Better.
The moderate holdout broke her silence on Friday about President Joe Biden’s $1.8 trillion social spending plan, saying only that she is still negotiating with fellow Democrats.
In a rare TV interview, the usually tightlipped Sinema declined to back the bill, which the House of Representatives passed last month.
“We’re crafting legislation that truly represents the interests they want to achieve and that creates a benefit and helps people all across Arizona and the country,” Sinema said to CNN. “So that’s what I’m working on right now.”
Sinema also declined to say exactly what provisions she wants cut or modified, a practice that has infuriated progressives looking to win passage of the bill.
“When you negotiate directly in good faith with your colleagues, and don’t negotiate publicly, you’re actually much more likely to find that agreement,” Sinema said.
Biden has vowed to win over all 50 Democratic senators and Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., says he wants it done before Christmas.
Sinema and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., are the two high-profile Democratic holdouts in the evenly divided Senate on Build Back Better. Democrats need all their senators to support the bill to enable it to pass with Vice President Kamala Harris holding a decisive tie-breaking vote.
WASHINGTON — The number of U.S. homes with a married couple and kids fell to a record low, according to new government data, as the pandemic further delayed weddings and more adults don’t plan to have kids at all.
The share of the U.S.’s 130 million households headed by married parents with children under age 18 fell to 17.8% in 2021 from 18.6% last year, according to the Census Bureau. That’s down from more than 40% in 1970.
By absolute numbers, there are just 23.1 million homes with nuclear families, the fewest since 1959, the data show.
The pandemic delayed many marriages over the past two years, adding six months to a woman’s age at first marriage — the most since 1987 — to now 28.6 years. In the 1950s and ’60s, women typically married at 20.4 years of age and 22.8 years for men.
Births have generally been on the decline as Americans are marrying later in life, which has grown more pronounced in the pandemic. The U.S. fertility rate fell to 55.4 births per 1,000 in the second quarter from 58.5 in the same period of 2019, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed Friday.
–Bloomberg News
VIENNA, Austria — Iran has taken a destructive stance in the recently re-initiated nuclear negotiations, according to highranking European diplomats.
“Iran is breaking with almost all the difficult compromises that were agreed as the result of several months of hard negotiations,” German, French and British negotiators said on Friday.
The window of opportunity for a diplomatic solution in the nuclear dispute is getting smaller and smaller, they warned. The United States was also unimpressed with Iran’s showing at the talks.
WASHINGTON — As Democrats seek to turn the political tide less than one year out from the midterm elections, they are increasingly leaning into the volatile issue of abortion, with the Roe v. Wade decision hanging in the balance at the U.S. Supreme Court.
The high court heard oral arguments Wednesday to a challenge of a Mississippi law that bans most abortions after 15 weeks, which directly confronts the landmark 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. Justices could issue a decision on the case next summer, just months before the 2022 elections.
While the economy and coronavirus pandemic are currently at the forefront of voters’ minds, Democrats and their liberal allies say a complete or partial overturning of Roe v. Wade could fundamentally alter the political equation, giving them an opening to energize base voters — especially young women — and make inroads with swing suburban women.
As they wait for the Supreme Court to rule on the Mississippi law, in addition to a separate Texas law that bans most abortion after six weeks and allows private citizens to help enforce it, abortion rights advocates say they need to start sounding the alarm on the potential rollback of Roe v. Wade now to have an impact next November.
“As it becomes more inevitable and less hypothetical, this is going to be a huge force in the midterms,” said Kristin Ford, vice president for communication and research at NARAL Pro-Choice America. “We have work to do to have voters understand the gravity of the situation. Increasingly that will become very, very clear.”