High Court Rules Against ‘Racial Gerrymandering’ : Law: Guarantee of equal treatment cited in case of North Carolina congressional district redrawn for blacks. Decision also applies to state, local governments.

In a potentially far-reaching political setback for blacks and Latinos, the Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Constitution does not permit “racial gerrymandering” for the purpose of electing minority candidates.

State officials violate the guarantee of equal treatment for all when they draw electoral boundaries so as “to segregate voters into separate voting districts because of their race,” said Justice Sandra Day O’Connor for the court.

“Racial gerrymandering, even for remedial purposes, may Balkanize us into competing racial factions,” she said. “It threatens to carry us further from the goal of a political system in which race no longer matters.”

The 5-4 decision in a North Carolina case reverses course from earlier rulings and Justice Department actions, which have pressured the states to seek the election of more racial minorities.

It came on the last day of the court’s term and prompted a sharp dissent from Justice Byron R. White, who officially retired Monday. It is “both a fiction and a departure from settled equal-protection principles,” he said, to declare that North Carolina has gone too far by creating new districts and electing the first African-American to Congress since Reconstruction.

Although 22% of the state’s residents were black, its entire delegation in the House of Representatives had been white.

Two years ago, reacting to Justice Department demands, North Carolina lawmakers redrew their congressional districts, and last year the state elected two blacks among its 12 members of Congress.

But on Monday, the high court revived a lawsuit filed by white voters who challenged these new district lines as violating the principle of a “colorblind” electoral process.

The ruling applies not only to congressional districts but also to electoral lines drawn for state legislators, county supervisors, school board members and any officials elected to state and local government bodies.

Experts in voting-rights law said the ruling is likely to trigger lawsuits nationwide that challenge “majority-minority” districts. Last year, 13 more blacks and 6 more Latinos were elected to Congress, mostly because of boundaries that were redrawn after the 1990 census.

It is not clear, however, whether the high court seeks to attack all racial line-drawing or only “bizarre” looking districts, like some that resemble a snake or an inkblot.

Certainly, the court focused its attention on one of the oddest looking districts. Although officially the 12th District of North Carolina, it is known popularly as the “I-85 district” because it follows Interstate 85 across the state to link a series of black enclaves.

“District 12 resembles a snake which is 160 miles long,” O’Connor said from the bench.

The district’s boundaries are “so highly irregular,” she said, that they “bear an uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid.”

Rather than giving representation to a cohesive community of black voters, North Carolina’s reapportionment plan “disregards traditional districting principles such as compactness, contiguity and respect for political subdivisions.”

This language suggests that while officials can create a district by drawing zigzags around a large community of black or Latino voters, they cannot link distant communities with the intent of creating a mostly minority district.

O’Connor’s opinion in Shaw vs. Reno, 92-357, was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas. The court sent the case back to a panel of federal district judges in North Carolina to decide on the next step.

Unless state officials come up with a compelling justification for their boundary lines, the judges could order the state to redraw its boundaries for the 1994 elections.

In California, experts said the decision would have no effect on state legislative and congressional districts, in part because they were drawn under the supervision of the California Supreme Court and not by the state Legislature.

However, the ruling could have an impact on several pending cases involving local governmental bodies, including a suit in Los Angeles federal court challenging the method of electing the Santa Maria City Council.

Monday’s decision again spotlights the profound dispute over what constitutes equality in voting--a controversy that was highlighted by President Clinton’s nomination and then withdrawal of Prof. C. Lani Guinier to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division.

A voting-rights expert and former litigator for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Guinier had argued that the Voting Rights Act was intended to create “equality” for blacks by ensuring that a roughly equal number of black representatives were elected. By this standard, also espoused by the Justice Department, North Carolina needed to redraw its electoral boundaries to give blacks representation in Congress. Otherwise, a state with more than a 22% black population would have had a 100% white congressional delegation.

But critics argue that this race-conscious approach violates the even older principle of “color-blind” voting. They say equality means the right to cast a ballot. It is not the right to have an equal or proportional share of the representatives.

Lawyers for the Republican National Committee, North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms and the American Jewish Congress were among those applauding Monday’s ruling.

“This is a tremendous victory for race-neutral voting. I think it is pretty clear that a dozen or so districts around the country will be found unconstitutional,” said Richard Samp of the Washington Legal Foundation, which filed a brief on Helms’ behalf.

Robert Lifton, president of the AJC, said his group had been concerned by the recent trend toward racial line-drawing, which “inevitably aggravates the polarization of the race, and generates racial and religious antagonisms.”

On the other side, an attorney for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law said the ruling will bring confusion and more litigation.

“This puts states into a bind, a Catch-22,” said attorney Frank Parker. If states fail to elect more minorities, they will violate the Voting Rights Act of 1982, which considers the results, not the process, he said.

However, if they use racial criteria to draw boundaries, they may violate the Constitution, Parker said.

The Arguments Behind the Ruling

Here are excerpts from the Supreme Court’s decision on the North Carolina congressional district:

OPINION FOR THE COURT

Sandra Day O’Connor: We believe that reapportionment is one area in which appearances do matter. A reapportionment plan that includes in one district individuals who belong to the same race, but who are otherwise widely separated by geographical and political boundaries, and who may have little in common with one another but the color of their skin, bears an uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid.

AMONG THE DISSENTERS’ OPINIONS . . .

Byron R. White: I have no doubt that the state’s compliance with the Voting Rights Act clearly constitutes a compelling interest . . . Hence, I see no need for a remand at all, even accepting the majority’s basic approach to this case.

John Paul Stevens: If it is permissible to draw boundaries to provide adequate representation for rural voters, for union members . . . it necessarily follows that it is permissible to do the same thing for members of the very minority group whose history in the United States gave birth to the Equal Protection Clause.

David H. Souter: The court offers no dramatic justification for treating the narrow category of bizarrely shaped district claims differently from other districting claims.

The District at Issue

Five white voters from Durham challenged North Carolina’s new, worm-shaped 12th District, which stretches 160 miles from Gastonia to Durham. The district is so narrow at one point that drivers in the northbound lanes of I-85 are in the 12th District but drivers in the southbound lanes are in the 6th.