The redistricting tangle.

• Author: Savage, David G.
• Position: Includes related articles

After all the trouble states have taken to draw majority-minority districts, the Supreme Court decides they're on the wrong track entirely.

For the second time in three years, the U.S. Supreme Court has scrambled the rules for legislative redistricting. The June 29 ruling in Miller vs. Johnson, which struck down a majority-black congressional district in Georgia, casts a cloud over scores of state and federal legislative districts and is sure to spawn a wave of new litigation. Lawmakers in some states probably will be required to redraw congressional district boundaries yet again.

The political consequences of all this are anyone's guess. Although the "majority-minority" districts at issue are solidly Democratic, some political experts think the Democrats, not the Republicans, will gain if these districts are broken up, since likely Democratic voters would be spread around to more districts, rather than concentrated in a few.

One thing seems clear though: The high court has changed sides within a decade on the issue of minority voters and the Voting Rights Act. That landmark 1965 law has been credited with assuring black Americans the right to vote. In 1982, Congress pushed it a bit further by adding protection for the right of blacks and Hispanics "to elect representatives of their choice." This was heralded at the time as a major victory by civil rights advocates over the Reagan administration. Four years later, the high court interpreted this phrase to mean that state lawmakers could not "dilute" the voting strength of minority communities. While neither this 1986 ruling in Thornburg vs. Gingles - nor anything else about voting rights law - is crystal clear, the U.S. Department of Justice read the ruling to require that the states, especially those in the South, make a good faith effort to bring about greater representation for African-Americans in Congress and in state legislatures.

That goal became the guiding principle after the 1990 census, and certainly much more needed to be done to bring about equal representation for African-Americans. In North Carolina, for example, the site of the Gingles ruling, 22 percent of the population was black, yet the state had sent no black representative to Congress in this century. Similarly, nearly 30 percent of Louisiana's population was black, yet it, too, had no black representatives on Capitol Hill. Prodded by the Justice Department, North Carolina drew two majority-black districts among its 12...