
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, July 5, 1993                   TAG: 9309020328
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

CAROLINA CASE

IN REFUSING last week to uphold North Carolina's congressional-district map, instead returning the case to a lower court for re-examination, the U.S. Supreme Court reasoned too sloppily and spoke too indefinitely. It left a host of new questions, all inviting additional litigation, about what states must and must not do, or may do but aren't required to, under the Constitution and under the federal Voting Rights Act.

The uncertainty is heightened by the closeness of the court's 5-4 split.

Yet for all that, the ruling makes at least one valuably important point: There f+iareo constitutional limits to race-oriented redistricting even when done in the name of protecting minority rights. In this instance, the court said, North Carolina's black-majority (53 percent) 12th Congressional District may well exceed those limits.

For reasons of both principle and realpolitik, politicians of both parties and all races have generally gone along with the idea that the Voting Rights Act requires minority-majority districts to be created wherever possible, regardless of how remote the possibility. The Carolina 12th represents the consequences of that idea, which evolved in the '80s, at its gerrymandering worst.

After the 1990 Census, Tar Heel legislators squeezed out a black-majority district by joining city neighborhoods along an arc from Charlotte to Durham. In places, the width of one lane of Interstate 85 provides the district's only connecting link. That's ridiculous, and indeed - as Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote - smacks of ``political apartheid.''

But what about, say, Virginia's black-majority 3rd Congressional District? It, too, is odd-shaped, though not as much so as the Carolina 12th. Throughout America, dozens of congressional and legislative districts are the bizarre-shaped results of all kinds of considerations, and not just the Voting Rights Act. Virginia legislators, for example, traditionally assign a high priority to incumbent protection in redrawing their own districts - a consideration, we suspect, not unique to lawmakers in the Old Dominion.

Scorn-worthy as such legislative efforts often are, judicial intervention raises constitutional questions of its own. The courts should enter the thicket warily, reserving it for extreme cases - of which the North Carolina 12th seems to be one. Where contiguity is defined as a highway lane, it may demand not simply judicial re-examination but outright rejection.

Meanwhile the Justice Department and many states, Virginia included, need to re-evaluate how they enforce the Voting Rights Act.

14Politicians of both parties and all races have generally gone along with the idea that the Voting Rights Act requires minority-majority districts to be created wherever possible, regardless of how remote the possibility.

by CNB