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

DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 7, 1993                   TAG: 9309010297
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Cal Thomas
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

GERRYMANDER

Most importantly, it did not rule unconstitutional any district drawn for the purpose of granting blacks and other minorities greater voting strength, particularly in view of the gerrymandering of the past that effectively disfranchised black voters from exercising much, if any, power at all. A 5-4 majority simply said that a group of white voters should have the chance to prove that districts drawn for the purpose of guaranteeing the election of blacks violate white voters' right to equal protection of the laws.

In calling the two districts drawn in such a way to guarantee the election of black House members ``bizarre,'' Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote, ``what appellants object to is redistricting legislation that is so extremely irregular on its face that it rationally can be viewed only as an effort to segregate the races for purposes of voting, without regard for traditional districting principles and without sufficiently compelling justification.''

The court allowed a lower court to hear arguments as to whether the districts are, in fact, constitutional, and it left open the possibility of declaring them so if such proof is persuasive.

To better understand the lower court's task, it is useful to recall the way congressional districts were first instituted and the reason. In the beginning, representatives were all elected ``at large.'' This meant that the most popular party received all of the representatives, even when some areas were opposed to that party. In 1842, Congress required the state legislatures to set up congressional districts so that each region would be more adequately and fairly represented.

During the Constitutional Convention in 1787, George Mason of Virginia anticipated the need for districts and remarked that the House was to be ``the grand depository of the democratic principle of the government .... It ought to know and sympathize with every part of the community; and ought therefore to be taken not only from different parts of the whole republic, but also from different districts of the larger members of it .... We ought to attend to the rights of every class of the people.''

Mason believed that ``every selfish motive ... every family attachment, ought to recommend such a system of policy as would provide no less carefully for the rights and happiness of the lowest, than of the highest, order of citizens.''

To be sure, long after Mason wrote those words, racist whites used gerrymandering to exclude black voters and guarantee that only whites were elected. It was not until the mid-1960s that Congress passed voting-rights legislation and the Justice Department began to exert federal authority in states with histories of disfranchising blacks.

But Justice O'Connor was right when she said, in effect, that two wrongs don't make a right. Classifications of citizens solely on the basis of race, she said, ``are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.''

There is something else, and that is the presumption that only black House members can effectively represent black constituents. If racial harmony is ever to be achieved in America, racial gerrymandering is not the way to do it. Far better for non-white candidates to make their cases to all voters so that, when they are elected, as many have been in mixed-race districts, they can rightly claim to be representing all the people and not just those who participated in the worst kind of affirmative action program, the kind that guarantees a predetermined outcome.

I am sympathetic to the wounds many black Americans still feel. But justice will come about through the election of qualified minorities, by voters of all racial and ethnic backgrounds.

With racial gerrymandering, race is all the voters will be able to think about. And continued discord, not equality and harmony, will be the result.

Los Angeles Times Syndicate

Keywords:
POLITICS