THE Supreme Court has never taken a stand against gerrymandering, the game in which legislators choose their voters, rather than the other way around. But when states draw electoral district lines using racial considerations, the justices have admonished them not to overdo it. There is no problem with designing “majority-minority” districts to enhance the odds for black and Hispanic voters’ favoured candidates—the Voting Rights Act of 1965 required some such efforts—but when electoral maps reflect a “predominant” reliance on race, they violate the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The upshot: states had better pay attention to race when drafting electoral maps—but not too much attention.
Threading that needle has been the challenge of state legislatures for decades, and in two related cases on December 5th, the justices seemed exasperated by their perennial role as overseers of those efforts. Justice Stephen Breyer said he had hoped that a ruling in 2015 regarding racial gerrymandering in Alabama “would end these cases in this court”. But that decision, he rued, “certainly doesn’t seem to have” accomplished the goal. The justices seem...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2g5RuAj
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