Justices Back Race-Based Redistricting

Just in time for the season of political redistricting, the Supreme Court on Wednesday gave states more leeway in creating electoral districts that favor blacks, Latinos and other minorities.

The 5-4 ruling steps back from a series of recent rulings that condemned “racial gerrymandering” in the South.

While the Constitution usually bars the government from making decisions based on race, states can make decisions for partisan political reasons, the justices said Wednesday. And since African Americans tend to vote Democratic, states may shift African American voters to one district to create a Democratic stronghold, they added.

The resulting mostly black district can be defended as “political rather than racial,” said Justice Stephen G. Breyer, and therefore would not run afoul of the law.

It is unclear whether Democrats or Republicans will benefit from Wednesday’s ruling.

On Capitol Hill, strategists for both parties saw an advantage. Democrats said the ruling would allow them to seek greater representation for minorities, while some Republicans said the GOP would gain if Democrats insist on packing a state’s minority voters into a few districts.

The race-based districts drawn after the 1990 census have garnered mixed reviews from political and legal analysts.

In the 1992 election, 39 African Americans were elected to Congress, up from 17 a decade earlier.

“We succeeded in creating a cadre of black elected officials, which was missing for most of the 20th century,” said Columbia University law professor Samuel Issacharoff, a voting rights expert. “At the same time, it has increased the polarization in Congress,” because districts in the South were drawn to favor either liberal black Democrats or conservative white Republicans.

Court Had Voided Redrawn District

Wednesday’s ruling upheld as constitutional the North Carolina district that has been the focus of much of the litigation over the last decade. The 12th District was drawn, and then redrawn, to favor a black Democrat, Rep. Mel Watt.

Five years ago, the court struck it down as a classic example of a racial gerrymander. A majority of the district’s voters were black, but this was accomplished by linking mostly black neighborhoods in Durham, Greensboro and Charlotte. As a result, Watt’s district stretched 160 miles down the center of the state but sometimes was only as wide as Interstate 85.

The state Legislature redrew it in 1997 to make it more compact. Currently, 46% of its voters--less than a majority--are black.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who voted earlier to strike down the district, switched sides Wednesday and joined the liberal coalition that upheld it.

“This is very good news for state legislatures as they begin the complex process of redistricting,” said former U.S. Solicitor General Walter Dellinger, who defended his home state of North Carolina in the case. “They now have considerably more breathing room.

“If the decision had gone the other way, states would have had to reduce the number of minority districts to avoid being sued,” said Dellinger, now a lawyer in the Washington office of the Los Angeles law firm O’Melveny & Myers.

Wednesday’s ruling applies to all electoral districts, including state and local governing boards.

The decision is expected to have much less practical impact in California than in the South, with its long history of political discrimination in elections.

“In California you have whites voting for Asians, whites voting for Latinos, whites voting for blacks,” said Tony Quinn, a Republican reapportionment expert. “We’ve got plenty of evidence of people getting elected here without the necessity of having overwhelmingly racially drawn districts.”

Southern California has several congressional districts in which members of minority groups constitute a voting majority, but each of them was drawn to be reasonably compact, and they have not been subject to challenge.

Litigation under federal anti-discrimination laws has played a larger role on the local level, however. Gloria Molina, for example, was elected the first Latina member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors a decade ago after a federal judge found that the county’s election boundaries had been drawn to split the Latino population.

New census numbers invariably set off an intense, behind-the-scenes struggle for political power. State legislatures are already working to adjust their districts according to recently released figures from the 2000 census.

Because populations shift, most states are obliged to redraw their electoral boundaries. Under the Supreme Court’s “one person, one vote” principle, the districts must be roughly equal in population.

As long as that condition is met, the states have been free to draw the boundaries that determine which voters go in which districts. And political power often turns on how those districts are drawn.

Over the last two decades, the issue of race has taken on a greater role.

When blacks and Latinos are in the minority, they cannot win an election when voters cast their ballots along racial lines.

North Carolina serves as an illustration. Though nearly 1 in 4 of its residents is black, the Tarheel State sent 12 white representatives to Congress for more than a century.

Change Is Traced to Rights Act

But Congress triggered a change with the Voting Rights Act of 1982. It encouraged states, where possible, to create districts that would elect minorities. These voters, when they were clustered in sufficient numbers, had a right to elect representatives of their choice, the new law said. Moreover, states could be sued if they failed to create districts that better represented these minority voters.

The first Bush administration also pressed the Southern states to create black-majority districts after the 1990 census. North Carolina created two black-majority districts among its 12 districts. Georgia created three among its 10 districts.

But in 1993, the Supreme Court switched directions. On a 5-4 vote, with O’Connor speaking for the majority, the justices condemned race-based districts as a type of “segregation” that “bears an uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid.”

Her opinion characterized race-based districting as a kind of political affirmative action that becomes unconstitutional if it goes too far.

Ever since then, the justices have struggled to say how much use of race in redistricting is too much.

O’Connor said nothing Wednesday, but her vote tipped the majority to the liberal side.

Breyer’s opinion did not set broad rules but rather reanalyzed the facts in the North Carolina case to show that partisanship, not race, mostly explained how Watt’s district was redrawn.

In 1997, the North Carolina Legislature met in a special session to redraw the boundaries. At the outset, legislative leaders said they wanted to maintain the current political balance in the state’s congressional delegation: six Republicans and six Democrats.

They said they shifted African American voters into Watt’s district because they are reliably Democrats.

Breyer’s opinion stressed two other points. White voters who are challenging a district must show how the “Legislature could have achieved its legitimate political objectives” in another way. In this instance, how could the Legislature have created a safe Democratic district in central North Carolina except by including as many black voters as possible?

Second, Breyer said that judges should be reluctant to second-guess state legislators on these intensely political matters.

“Caution is especially appropriate in this case, where the state has articulated a legitimate political reason for its districting decision, and the voting population is one in which race and political affiliation are highly correlated,” Breyer said.

The long-running North Carolina case has been driven by Duke University law professor Robinson O. Everett. Since 1992, he has enlisted some local white voters as plaintiffs to challenge the black-majority districts as unconstitutional.

The lawsuits have split a special U.S. District Court panel. Chief Judge Terrence W. Boyle, a protege of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), agreed with the white challengers last year and called Watt’s district “race driven.” He was joined by another Republican-appointed judge, while a Democratic appointee dissented.

Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt appealed the 2-1 decision to the high court, arguing that the Legislature had done its duty in redrawing the district lines.

The justices agreed with him Wednesday in Hunt vs. Cromartie, 99-1864. Besides O’Connor, Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined Breyer’s opinion.

The conservative dissenters said the court should have deferred to the district judges and struck down the district again. Usually, the conservative justices argue for deferring to elected state legislators, but not in this instance.

“Racial gerrymandering offends the Constitution whether the motivation is malicious or benign,” said Justice Clarence Thomas in dissent. He was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy.

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Times staff writers Greg Miller in Washington and Mark Z. Barabak in Los Angeles contributed to this story.