Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 13, 1993 TAG: 9306150373
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GEOFF SEAMANS ASSOCIATE EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
You adopt points of view, pass judgments, propose ideas - and do it all in writing, as both Bork and Guinier have done - and you're bound to hack off some of the people a lot of the time.
Now, some of the people are wrong a lot of the time. But sometimes they're right. Somewhere along the way, the law of averages is going to catch up with you; at some point, you're bound to say something you wish you hadn't.
Granted, my sympathy with Bork and Guinier only goes so far. After all, their views and the expression thereof didn't exactly shove them below the poverty line. Bork could be a Reaganite federal judge, just not a Supreme Court justice. Guinier can be a university professor, just not a Clintonite assistant attorney general for civil rights.
Moreover, the writings in question were unquestionably relevant to the jobs in question.
Still, the sympathy. However divergent their views in other respects, for example, Bork and Guinier strike me as alike in one: They simply extended by a few steps familiar, politically correct strands of thinking. Unfortunately for Bork's and Guinier's career upward-mobility, the steps were just enough to - it's metaphor time - push them over the cliffs of provocativeness into the chasm of absurdity.
In Bork's case, he walked a step or two beyond the familiar rhetoric of "judicial restraint"- and ended with a Constitution that would be little more than an organizational flow-chart, rather than a fundamental guarantor of American freedoms.
In Guinier's case, her argument that race-based legislative minorities should on some issues have veto power over majority decisions flows from voting-rights policies pursued by many of those - including conservative Republicans - who helped sink her nomination.
The initial premise of the Voting Rights Act was straightforward: The right to vote cannot be denied on account of race. Passage in the late '60s was needed because this right was being systematically denied in some places, especially to black citizens in parts of the South.
Overt voting barriers fell quickly, but other ways often were found to limit the political influence of racial minorities - for example, in congressional and legislative districting. In response, the concept of voting rights expanded to include protection not only from intimidation, sham literacy tests and the like, but also from subtler discrimination. This, too, was needed.
But during the '80s, continued expansion of the concept led to less defensible propositions. Wherever a congressional or legislative district can be drawn with a majority of minority voters, it must be, regardless of other considerations. And the bigger that majority, under currently accepted voting-rights thinking, the better.
The results are bizarre-shaped creatures such as Virginia's 3rd Congressional District, which to get its big black majority relied on the James River as a thin link between inner-city Norfolk and the east side of Richmond. In North Carolina, one congressional district is tied together by the width of an interstate highway, a narrow ribbon indeed.
It's no secret that blacks, Hispanic-speaking and native Americans tend to vote Democratic. Yet the fashioning of race-based districts virtually guaranteed to elect liberal Democrats occurred under a Republican Justice Department and a Republicanized federal judiciary. Why?
Because there's a tradeoff. Minority voters collected into a single district have to come from somewhere, and they do - neighboring districts that then become more Republican. The price to minority voters of gaining dominance in one district is the loss of influence in two or three districts.
Hence, the implicit syllogism of Guinier's argument. Voting rights include a guaranteed number of minority faces in legislatures. But to achieve this is, on balance, to reduce racial minorities' influence within legislatures. Ergo, minority legislators must be given extra, compensatory powers.
When the logical next step propels you into the abyss, maybe it's time to rethink the steps that got you to the edge of the cliff.
by CNB