Court Disallows Gerrymandering : Winning Party Cannot Blatantly Redraw Boundaries, Justices Hold

The Supreme Court on Monday declared political gerrymandering unconstitutional for the first time, ruling that a winning party cannot blatantly redraw voting boundaries to give itself a partisan advantage.

Ruling on a case in which Indiana Democrats had sought to overturn a redistricting plan drawn by the state’s Republican majority, the high court--by a 6-3 margin--said judges should overturn political districts that were carved out in a way that ensures the “continued frustration” of one segment of voters. However, on a 7-2 vote the justices overturned a lower court ruling that would have applied that standard to the Indiana plan.

The ruling is likely to revive a court challenge by California’s Republican congressmen to a 1982 state redistricting engineered by the Democratic majority in the Legislature. But the high court opinion on the Indiana plan did not make clear how much evidence--or what kind--is needed to show that the system is fundamentally unfair.

Noting that gerrymandering is a time-honored American tradition, the justices said they did not want to get “embroiled” in regularly “second-guessing” political decisions.

“Relying on a single election to prove unconstitutional discrimination is unsatisfactory,” Justice Byron R. White said in a plurality opinion. “Unconstitutional discrimination occurs only when the electoral system is arranged in a manner that will consistently degrade a voter’s or groups of voters’ influence on the political process as a whole.”

The case began when the Indiana Republican Party, holding a majority in the state Legislature, redrew political lines after the 1980 census. “The name of the game,” one Republican leader said, “is to keep us in power.”

In the 1982 election, Democratic candidates for the Statehouse won 52% of the vote but only 43 of 100 seats. Based on that, a federal District Court ruled the redistricting plan unconstitutional because it had “a built-in bias favoring the majority party.”

On appeal, the high court faced two issues--whether the courts could decide such clearly political questions and whether the Indiana plan violated the “equal protection” clause of the Constitution.

Standards Not Spelled Out

White, joined by Justices William J. Brennan Jr., Thurgood Marshall and Harry A. Blackmun, said political gerrymandering could be unconstitutional. Although the four would set a very high standard for proving it, they did not spell out any specific standards for doing so.

Justices Lewis F. Powell Jr. and John Paul Stevens agreed that courts could decide gerrymandering issues and would go a step further by accepting a lesser standard of proof. They said the 1982 balloting in Indiana showed the system to be unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, the three conservatives--Chief Justice Warren E. Burger and Justices William H. Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor--said the courts had no business intervening in entirely political disputes.

With so much at stake in the Indiana case, political enemies be came legal allies. The California Democrats joined the Indiana Republicans in urging the high court to stay out of political fights. On the other hand, the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Republican National Committee said the courts should intervene because majority parties were manipulating voting boundaries to ensure their members’ reelection.

The Supreme Court first involved itself in redistricting questions in 1962, when the court under Chief Justice Earl Warren set forth the “one-man, one-vote” principle in ruling that districts must be of equal population. Since then, the justices have reviewed political boundaries only when they worked to the disadvantage of racial minorities. Monday’s ruling marks the first time a majority of the justices have concluded that courts could come to the aid of a political minority (Davis vs. Bandemer, 84-1244).

In Washington, both national political parties claimed victory. Republican National Committee Chairman Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr. hailed the ruling as “a landmark decision” that will allow the minority party to challenge political lines drawn by “a transient majority which entrenches itself.” Democrats control most of the state legislatures in the nation.

Not ‘a Quick Fix’

Democratic National Committee Chairman Paul G. Kirk Jr., however, said the decision was not “a quick fix” for Republicans who have failed “to win control of more legislatures.” The decision sets “some very tough standards of proof that any discrimination has occurred against a political group,” he noted.

In California, the Democratic majority in the Legislature, using a political map designed by the late Rep. Phillip Burton, redrew political boundaries in late December, 1982, days before Republican Gov. George Deukmejian took office. In the 1984 election, Republican candidates for Congress received slightly more votes statewide: 49% to 48%. Yet, the Democrats won 27 of the 45 seats, or 60%.

A suit filed in federal court in San Francisco challenging the Burton plan has been on hold pending the outcome of the Indiana case.

Bizarre Shapes

James Parrinello, an attorney for the California Republicans, said the Democrats created “an incredible number of bizarrely shaped districts”--some of which extend from the Pacific Ocean to Nevada--to lump as many Republican voters as possible into as few districts as possible. The plan was “rammed through the Legislature” without public debate, he said, and will “eliminate competition for congressional seats” for the rest of this decade.

However, Jonathan Steinberg, a Los Angeles attorney representing the Democrats, said he was “quite confident that the Republicans can’t meet the very high standards of proof” that will be needed to overturn the plan in court.

The “disproportionate results” cited by the Republicans are “a fact of life in California,” Steinberg said, mostly because Democratic districts have lower voting turnouts. Although all of the districts have the same number of people, he said, relatively fewer voters come to the polls in districts made of poor and minority residents. When these figures are added together, it looks as though the results were unfair.

“These proportionality measures are a useless way to evaluate the fairness of a redistricting,” Steinberg said.

In a related case, the justices ruled unanimously that North Carolina violated the Voting Rights Act by drawing electoral districts that diluted the voting strength of blacks (Thornburg vs. Gingles, 83-1968).

Court ruling is likely to reignite the reapportionment issue in California. Page 3.