
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, June 29, 1993                   TAG: 9306290139
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: STATE 
SOURCE: From staff and wire reports
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

BUT VIRGINIA DISTRICTS EXPECTED TO MAKE THE GRADE WITH COURT

While legal scholars said the Supreme Court's decision Monday could jeopardize majority-minority districts in other states, authorities in Virginia expressed confidence the state's districts will pass muster with the high court.

"The case in North Carolina is much more extreme than any district in Virginia, state or federal," said Rep. Robert Scott, D-Newport News. His Richmond-to-Norfolk district was drawn with the idea of giving blacks a chance to elect a black congressman; he is the first black since Reconstruction to represent Virginia in Washington.

Scott said the high court's decision in the North Carolina case means that challenges to black-majority districts can be heard, not that the opponents will prevail.

"The district court could easily conclude that although the district looked bizarre, there were rational reasons for it and sustain the redistricting," Scott said.

"Even the North Carolina plan may be upheld on remand," agreed University of Virginia constitutional expert A.E. "Dick" Howard. "I think the Virginia plan would be upheld easier. The configuration [of Scott's district] is simply not so bizarre."

State Sen. Joseph Gartlan, chairman of the Senate committee that helped draw the boundaries, said the Supreme Court ruling shouldn't offer any new threat to Scott's district or any black-majority districts "because the possibility of litigating the validity of these districts has always been present."

Gartlan added that the Scott district "wasn't bizarre at all. It was a piece of artwork."

Elsewhere, civil rights advocates condemned the ruling.

"It sounds very damaging for minority voting rights," said Frank Parker, director of the Voting Rights Project of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

The decision "has the potential for jeopardizing all 26 majority-black and majority-Hispanic congressional districts, and hundreds of state legislative districts that were created after the 1990 census," Parker said.

But O'Connor's opinion "fails to provide guidance, so we can't tell what the scope of the decision may be," he added. "There are so many different kinds and shapes of districts that it's difficult to tell what is vulnerable and what is not."

The court majority refused to say whether deliberately drawing a minority-dominated district is always open to constitutional challenge. Dissenting Justice David Souter speculated that the impact of the decision may be narrow because few districts are as bizarre as North Carolina's District 12.

In reviving the suit, O'Connor stressed a 1960 ruling striking down a statute that redrew Tuskegee, Ala., to remove almost all black voters from the city.

If that was unconstitutional segregation, O'Connor said, so is a state's effort to concentrate a minority population in a single district "by disregarding traditional districting principles such as compactness, contiguity and respect for political subdivisions."

Keywords:
POLITICS

by CNB