Court goes a-hunting gerrymanders.

• Author: Savage, David G.

Redistricting after the census can be a legislative nightmare, especially if a state has seen a substantial gain or loss in population. Sometimes, the new district lines are drawn up in back rooms, at other times by disinterested experts. But either way, few are likely to be entirely pleased by the results, and many will be downright angry.

That already messy process grew more confused and difficult in June thanks to a Supreme Court decision in a North Carolina case. On a 5-4 vote, the justices said for the first time that 'racial gerrymandering" may be unconstitutional.

"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," wrote justice Sandra Day O'Connor for the Court.

The 14th Amendment guarantees each person 'equal protection of the law," and this has been interpreted as forbidding any sort of racial discrimination by state officials. North Carolina lawmakers appear to have violated that amendment, O'Connor said, by using race as the main criterion in drawing boundaries for two of its congressional districts.

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

The high court's decision in the case of Shaw vs. Reno revived a lawsuit filed by white voters who claimed that their rights were violated by the state legislature's creation of two "majority-minority" districts. The decision sent the case back to North Carolina for a further court hearing to see whether the state can justify its district lines or be ordered to make changes.

Certainly, the North Carolina lawmakers have reason to feel snakebitten. They created these new districts under pressure from the Justice Department, which in turn said it was following the dictates of the Voting Rights Act of 1982. In that measure, Congress encouraged an increase in the number of black and Latino representatives through electoral changes. Before, voting procedures were illegal only if it could be shown they were adopted to discriminate against minorities. But in 1982, Congress went further and said an electoral system is illegal if "it is shown that (minorities) have less opportunity than other members of the electorate ... to elect representatives of their choice." Under this approach, results count.

In North Carolina, slightly more than 20 percent of the voters are black, yet the state had sent no African-Americans to Congress since the Reconstruction era. For that reason, the Justice Department urged the state to create two of its 12 congressional districts with black majorities, and state officials did just that.

The First District of North Carolina has its core in the northeast section of the state, but extends through rural communities in the southeast section. The 12th District, the other with a majority black...