High Court Again Cuts Back Voting Rights Act : Law: States with a large population of blacks or Latinos need not create ‘majority-minority’ districts.

The Supreme Court picked up where it left off in late June by cutting back again Monday on the reach of the Voting Rights Act.

In a brief ruling as it opened its new term, the court said that states with a large population of blacks and Latinos need not always create “majority-minority” electoral districts to satisfy the law.

Instead, states can set up several districts where minority voters make up at least 25% of the total and can thereby influence who gets elected, the court said.

The 8-1 decision in a Tennessee case is the latest sign that states no longer will be under legal pressure to create electoral districts that elect minorities to Congress, the state Legislature, county councils or school boards.

As usual on the first Monday in October, the court issued a list of orders dismissing appeals in more than 1,500 cases that had piled up over the summer.

Among them, the court:

* Refused for now to hear a constitutional challenge to the 1994 law that makes it a federal crime to block access to an abortion clinic. Opponents of the law say that it violates their free-speech rights and exceeds Congress’ power. Monday’s action (American Life League vs. Reno, 94-1867) does not prevent the court from hearing a challenge later.

* Rejected a “pauper’s” appeal filed by jailed financier Charles H. Keating (Keating vs. Office of Thrift Supervision, 94-9092). He claimed that the federal Office of Thrift Supervision had made him the “primary scapegoat” for the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s by seeking $387 million in fines and restitution from him. Now in prison in Tucson, Keating--owner of the defunct Lincoln Savings & Loan, whose collapse in 1989 cost taxpayers $2.6 billion--claimed that he could not pay the standard $300 fee to file an appeal in the Supreme Court.

Although the court’s refusal to hear an appeal set no legal precedent in the 1,500 cases, the voting-rights case was different because the justices issued an order upholding the restrictive ruling in the Tennessee case.

After the 1990 census, most states with a large number of minority voters sought to create such districts to comply with the law.

They relied on the Voting Rights Act of 1982, which said that minorities not only had a right to vote but a right “to elect representatives of their choice.”

In 1986, a liberal majority of the Supreme Court had said that provision obliged states with large blocs of minority voters to draw electoral districts that ensured those voters would be represented in Congress, the state Legislature or other elected bodies. That view of the law drove the creation of new minority districts from Florida to California and led to a doubling of the number of black members of Congress.

But in the last two years, the conservative majority of the high court has unraveled that view.

In June, the court on a 5-4 vote said that the Constitution does not allow states to use race as a “predominant factor” in drawing electoral boundaries. That decision, in Miller vs. Johnson, put a limit on so-called “racial gerrymandering.”

In Monday’s brief ruling, the court made clear that the law does not require states to draw majority-black districts.

“It’s a very troubling decision,” said Brenda Wright, an attorney for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “There are a lot of districts where minorities are 25% and they don’t have a ghost of a chance of influencing who gets elected.”

Monday’s decision likely will have an impact in areas where blacks or Latinos do not make up a clear majority, but where they could constitute a majority if boundaries were drawn in a favorable way.

In west Tennessee, attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union pressed the state to draw a majority-black district outside Memphis.

At first, a three-judge panel agreed. It said that the law “requires the state to engage in affirmative action based on race in such situations by establishing majority-black districts in substantial proportion to the black voting-age population.”

But the Supreme Court reversed that decision last year and ordered the lower court to try again.

This time, the judges said that the state can create an “influence district” to comply with the law. In the jargon of the voting-rights law, an “influence district” is “any district in which a minority group makes up 25% to 55% of the voting-age population,” the lower court noted.

“We are confident that a minority population that votes as a bloc and comprises at least 25% of the voting-age population in an electoral district will have a significant influence on candidates in virtually every election,” wrote Judge Gilbert Merritt.

The ACLU appealed, saying that this approach “substantially reduces the scope” of the 1982 law.

With only Justice John Paul Stevens dissenting, the high court affirmed Merritt’s ruling in the case (Rural West Tennessee African-American Council vs. Sundquist, 94-1922).

The first round of oral argument began without Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who was home recovering from back surgery. Stevens, the senior associate justice, took his place. He announced that Rehnquist, 71, expects to return shortly and that he will vote in the cases heard this week after listening to taped arguments.

Among the long list of cases in which appeals were dismissed without comment, the court:

* Refused to hear a free-speech challenge to California’s “green labeling” law (Assn. of National Advertisers vs. Lungren, 94-1930). The 1990 measure defines such terms as “biodegradable” and “recyclable”; advertisers contended that the First Amendment does not allow the state to claim a word for its own use.

* Refused again to hear a would-be gun owner’s claim that the Second Amendment gives her a right to “keep and bear arms” (Love vs. Pepersack, 94-1947). A Maryland woman was turned down when she sought to buy a handgun because state officials said that her record showed a conviction for a petty crime. She appealed to the federal courts and insisted that the Second Amendment restricted the state and gave her a right to have a gun.

“She is wrong on both counts,” a U.S. appeals court judge said. He followed the routine judicial view--if not the popular one--that the Second Amendment does not give individuals a right to bear arms.

* Let stand a federal court ruling from California that says that police do not violate a fleeing suspect’s constitutional rights when they set loose a police dog that maims the suspect (Shannon vs. City of Santa Ana, 94-2097). An officer who brutally beats a suspect could be charged with using excessive force. But the federal courts have refused to recognize claims involving excessive force when police dogs are used. The case began when Santa Ana officers sent a police dog after a fleeing motorist, who suffered a gaping wound in his arm and severe bites on his neck.

* K-9 RULING: Justices reject claims of O.C. men bitten by police dogs. B4

* KEATING MUST PAY: The jailed financier’s multimillion-dollar fine was upheld. D1