Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 11, 1995 TAG: 9507110034
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LINDA SEEBACH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In a redistricting case decided last month, the Supreme Court reminded everyone that the Voting Rights Act meant what it said. It ruled that Georgia's 11th Congressional District, an odd-shaped bit of the state whose borders were drawn to create a third majority-black district, was unconstitutional because race was the predominant factor in its design.
From the resulting outcry, you'd think the Rehnquist court wanted to return to slavery.
Read the decision in Miller vs. Johnson, though, and it is clear nothing of the sort is true. ``When the State assigns voters on the basis of race, it engages in the offensive and demeaning assumption that voters of a particular race, because of their race, think alike, share the same political interests and will prefer the same candidates at the polls,'' wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the 5-4 majority.
That race trumped everything else in the design of Georgia's 11th is not in question. After the 1990 census, Georgia gained an additional seat. Because Georgia is a Southern state, it is required to obtain permission from Washington before making any change in how it conducts its elections. Twice the Georgia legislature submitted redistricting plans that included two black-majority districts, and twice the Department of Justice - President Bush's department, remember - refused to clear the plans, although there was no evidence that they had been designed to dilute minority voting rights. Georgia's population is 27 percent black, but the extent to which that translates into sensibly drawn congressional districts depends on continued residential segregation.
With personal computers and census data, anybody can play the redistricting game, and a lot of people do. One plan preferred by the Justice Department was the so-called ``max-black'' plan drafted by the American Civil Liberties Union for the black caucus in the Georgia General Assembly.
``It became obvious,'' Justice Kennedy said, ``both from the Justice Department's objection letters and the three preclearance rounds in general, that [the Justice Department] would accept nothing less than abject surrender to its maximization agenda.''
The resulting district looks bizarre enough. ``The black population of Meriwether County was gouged out of the Third District and attached to the Second District by the narrowest of land bridges; Effingham and Chatham Counties were split to make way for the Savannah extension, which itself split the City of Savannah; and the plan as a whole split 26 counties, 23 more than the existing congressional districts,'' Kennedy's opinion said.
But the peculiar shape itself is not the problem, the court held, it is merely more evidence (if needed) that nobody would have drawn a district that shape except for a constitutionally impermissible focus on race. That clarifies a 1993 decision, Shaw vs. Reno, which disallowed another oddly shaped race-based district.
The stakes in Miller are much bigger than one seat in Georgia of course, but it's less obvious who the stakeholders are. Most American blacks vote Democratic, so one effect of concentrating them into black-majority districts is to create Democrat-majority districts as well.
Democrats would like that, except for the uncomfortable fact that in the South there are too few Democrats to spread around. With fewer Democrats in other districts, more Republicans are likely to be elected.
That's what happened in Georgia. The state's delegation before redistricting was seven Democrats and four Republicans; now it's three Democrats. (Four were elected but one switched parties.)
The unintended consequence of all this racial gerrymandering may be less political power for minorities. In the 1994 election, the number of blacks in Congress increased from 24 to 39, but all except two are Democrats and now there is a Republican majority. The Black Caucus therefore has much less power than before. More blacks are likely to be elected as Republicans - some of the 20-plus who lost in 1994 will return as winners next year - but they will be elected because of their ideas, not their race.
Even more subtly, the influence of racial minorities who aren't gerrymandered into special districts may be diluted. Georgia's 6th District, for instance, home to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, was 20 percent black before redistricting and only 6 percent afterwards - possibly a small enough group that it could be safely ignored in coalition-building, if Gingrich were so inclined.
Even those who don't see anything invidious about voting districts based principally on race have to recognize that there isn't any way to avoid the practical consequences of trading off one form of influence for another. Lani Guinier, President Clinton's nominee to head the civil-rights division of the Justice Department, came to the same conclusion, although her proposed solutions were the opposite of the court's.
The court's principle of racial neutrality will be even more essential as the nation's population becomes not merely black-and-white but multicolored. However odd their boundaries, and some of the districts likely to be challenged as a result of Miller look as if they were drawn by a crazed hacker with a fractal-generating program, at least they are all in one piece - ``contiguous,'' as it's called. Stir in one or two more racial groups, and the map-drawing becomes impossible unless the courts are willing to tolerate districts that cross each other along freeway overpasses.
The Voting Rights Act guarantees citizens candidates of their choice, not candidates of their color. The court said, correctly, that politicians should not presume those are the same thing.
Linda Seebach is the editorial-page editor of the Valley Times in Pleasanton, Calif.
- New York Times News Service
by CNB