Editors at National Review Online assess the US Supreme Court’s latest redistricting decision.
The era of racial gerrymandering to segregate black voters in their own districts has been a long, ugly chapter in American life that vividly illustrates how a remedy for racial injustice can curdle into a racket that produces injustices of its own. One side effect of drawing districts for racial reasons is that it institutionalizes race-conscious politics while isolating racial groups from effective political competition. This yields politicians who get elected by racial appeals and stay in office through scandal and senility unto death.
Whatever sense this all might have made for black voters half a century ago, those voters are today so integrated into the mainstream of the Democratic Party — and, at the margins, more open to Republicans as well — that they ought to be treated the same as every other American. Certainly, black voters are nowhere ignored in statewide or national elections. Breaking down the race-specific walls around legislative districts is apt, in the long run, to produce a healthier politics.
That day is now here.
For too long, without a clear mandate in the language enacted by Congress, the Supreme Court has left states between a legal Scylla and Charybdis, simultaneously expected to draw race-conscious districts to comply with the Voting Rights Act and to draw those districts without considering race to avoid violating the Constitution. Like any charade that requires politicians to pretend not to be doing what they are compelled to do, this was unsustainable.
Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion for a 6–3 Court along the now-customary ideological lines in Louisiana v. Callais went back to first principles: “The Constitution almost never permits the Federal Government or a State to discriminate on the basis of race.” The Court’s redistricting precedents have led legislatures and lower courts to forget that “allowing race to play any part in government decision-making represents a departure from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context.”
