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

DATE: TUESDAY, November 21, 1995                   TAG: 9511210067
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IRONIES

TWO TIDEWATER-region Republicans have a strong case in challenging the post-1990 gerrymander that created a black-majority congressional district in eastern Virginia. To get a district with so big (64 percent) a black majority, General Assembly redistricters had to fashion a bizarre-shaped creature that stretches along the James River from eastern Richmond to Norfolk. The gerrymander is indefensible.

Still, like so much else about race relations in America, the lawsuit filed by 3rd District GOP Chairman Don Moon of Hampton and black activist Robert Smith of Norfolk abounds in complicating ironies.

For starters, the Republican plaintiffs are challenging an extreme interpretation of the Voting Rights Act that in part reflects their own party's interest in exploiting voting-rights concerns to maximize GOP congressional strength. Racial gerrymandering after the 1990 Census created more black-majority districts, and led to the election of more black members of Congress, than ever before in the nation's history. But while the new black-majority districts are almost invariably Democratic, their creation Republicanizes more than enough adjacent districts to be a boon to the GOP.

In Virginia, for example, creation of a solidly Democratic 3rd made at least two adjacent districts, the 1st and the 2nd, significantly more Republican (though the 2nd continues, precariously, to be represented by a holdover Democrat). In states like North Carolina and Georgia, the boost to the GOP has been even greater. Still, at least in Virginia, critics of the plan are Republicans; its defenders, Democrats.

A second irony is exemplified by the congressman from the 3rd, Democrat Robert Scott of Newport News. Scott, who is black, almost certainly could have been elected to Congress from an un-gerrymandered district with far fewer black voters. For years, Scott represented a white-majority Newport News district in the state Senate. During the redistricting deliberations after the 1990 Census, he called for a plan that would have put him in a congressional district with a substantial, but not majority, black population.

A third irony lies in the basis for the lawsuit - a decision this summer by a "conservative" Supreme Court that led the justices deeper into the thorny political thicket of overruling redistricting decisions than any previous court had dared tread. Not content to rule simply that state legislatures shouldn't be forced by federal voting-rights legislation into creating so many black-majority districts as an alliance of black politicians and a then-Republican Justice Department had pressed them to create, the court declared it unconstitutional for a state legislature to draw any congressional district with race in mind as the principle factor.

As a policy goal, curbing racial gerrymandering and the cynical manipulation of racial politics that it both engenders and flows from, is admirable. But more lawsuits, and injunctions, and the prospect of court-ordered mid-decade redistrictings, are a heckuva way to get there.

by CNB