ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, June 15, 1996 TAG: 9606170063
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
IN OVERTURNING four ethnicity-based congressional districts, one in North Carolina and three in Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court this week achieved a worthy result - but in a worrisome way.
The worthy result is an end, presumably, to one predominantly black and grotesquely shaped district in North Carolina, and to one predominantly Hispanic and two predominantly black districts in Texas. Such gerrymandering has gone to absurd, computer-enabled lengths. The result often is resegregation of voting constituencies, and a dimunition of the political leverage of the mass of minority voters even if the electoral prospects of a few minority politicians are boosted.
Moreover, the rulings this week came in just two of a series of cases involving several states - including Virginia, whose black-majority 3rd Congressional District is to be the subject of constitutional arguments scheduled next month in Roanoke before a panel of three federal judges.
Concerns about the practical effects of race-conscious districting are fit subjects for debate by federal and state lawmakers: Is the Voting Rights Act in fact working to protect minority voting rights?
Such concerns might well serve, too, as grounds for court decisions to rein in overzealous interpretations of the Voting Rights Act - for example, by the Justice departments of the Reagan and Bush administrations - that guided state legislatures to the mistaken conclusion that the act requires the drawing of minority-majority districts wherever remotely possible.
This, however, isn't quite how the rulings are coming down.
Rather than tell state legislatures what they need not do, a majority of the high court is telling state legislatures what they cannot do. Thus does a majority of the high court, giving the lie to the frequent equation of conservatism with judicial restraint, venture further into the political thicket.
The new circumscription is that legislatures cannot make race a predominant factor in district-drawing. This is a corollary of the long-standing and correct principle that racial classifications, to pass constitutional muster, must withstand the strictest level of scrutiny in determining whether they further a legitimate public purpose. But one of those legitimate purposes has been to erase the effects of racial discrimination, an argument the court seems increasingly ready to discount.
Moreover, "predominant factor" can be a slippery concept when it comes to redistricting, which usually is the product of a complex of interests and motives. The Virginia map is absurd, and should be overturned, as it forces Norfolk and Richmond voters into an ugly and gerrymandered, if black-majority, district that increases rather than decreases racial polarization and decreases rather than increases minority voter leverage.
But, as defenders of the Virginia map point out, its drawing also reflected a legislative desire to protect incumbent Democrats and force two Republicans (Rep. Thomas Bliley and then-Rep., now-Gov. George Allen) into the same district. Those motives are rankly political, of course, and far from noble. So far, though, judges have not said politics is unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court should tread on redistricting, but more cautiously.
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