Shaw V. Reno

8 Key excerpts on "Shaw V. Reno"

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  The Appearance of Equality

  Racial Gerrymandering, Redistricting, and the Supreme Court

  • Christophe M. Burke(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4 Shaw V. Reno: What It Means, Does Not Mean, and Why Shaw V. Reno is the most influential political representation case since the passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965. 1 Shaw I is not simply a VRA case; it is also a 14th Amendment, Equal Protection Clause case. It refocuses the debate over fair representation on its elements: Who is represented? How should the government ensure fair representation? Do some groups have a special claim on representation? The affirmative grant by the state to a minority group in the form of a majority-minority district, as was the issue in Shaw, must be justified.2 As such, an effective narrative for majority-minority districting characterizes the need for more representation as compelling, and presents a remedy through the least burdensome means.3 This chapter reviews how Shaw and subsequent cases reappraise the elements of fair representation in a newly emergent liberal rhetoric and brings into question certain justifications for majority-minority districting. Indeed, the rhetoric of liberalism successfully challenged the political edifice of the VRA and fundamentally altered its interpretation. Before the passage of the VRA in 1965, reapportionment and voting rights cases were decided on constitutional grounds. 4 This was true of such landmark decisions as Wesberry v. Sanders, Gomillion v. Lightfoot, and Reynolds v. Sims, as well as the "White Primary" cases. 5 The difficulty with basing a cause of action on the Constitution is the general reticence of federal judges and Supreme Court justices to decide a case on constitutional grounds. If given the chance, courts prefer to avoid constitutional issues, especially those that might put them into conflict with higher courts or other branches of government. Instead, courts decide cases as narrowly as possible, and avoid constitutional issues by making factual distinctions among cases, issues, and facts, and by reinterpreting the meaning of statutes.

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  Encyclopedia of the Fourth Amendment

  • John R. Vile, David L. Hudson Jr., John R Vile, David L. Hudson(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • CQ Press

    (Publisher)

  BLACK SUFFRAGE the state had sent no blacks to Congress since the post–Civil War Reconstruction era. When the state gained a new House seat after the 1990 census, the state legislature initially created one black-majority district, but then yielded to Justice Department pressure to create a second. One of the new congressional districts, the First, was relatively compact, but the second black-majority district, the Twelfth, wound 160 miles through the center of the state to link black neighborhoods in four urban areas. Both districts elected black representatives, each one a Democrat.

  The ensuing legal fight over the map exposed a division within the Republican Party over how to approach racial redistricting. Many of the new minority-majority districts had been drawn with the support and sometimes active participation of Republican officials, who saw the new districts as offering them the opportunity to show their concern for the interests of minority voters—most of whom had long favored the Democratic Party—while also concentrating many minority voters into a small number of districts, thereby removing them from surrounding districts that would become more likely to vote Republican.

  Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, seen here as a Supreme Court nominee with President Ronald Reagan in 1981, delivered the majority opinion in Shaw V. Reno, stating that the redistricting plan in question bore “an uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid.”

  Source: National Archives and Records Administration.

  This strategy was not universally hailed, though, as was evident when the North Carolina REPUBLICAN PARTY joined with a group of white voters to challenge the state’s district map in court. Their suits contended that the plan set up a “racially discriminatory process” and deprived white voters of the right to vote “in a colorblind election.” The Justice Department, under Republican president George H. W. Bush, joined the state in defending the plan. They argued that the minority-majority districts were necessary to comply with the Voting Rights Act and to remedy past discrimination against black voters. The suits were dismissed by a three-judge federal district court but reinstated by the Supreme Court in a 5–4 decision, SHAW V. RENO (1993).

  In her opinion for the Court, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor acknowledged that racial considerations could not be excluded from the redistricting process. But she said that in “some exceptional cases” a plan could be “so highly irregular that, on its face, it rationally cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to segregate voters on the basis of race.” A district that ignores geographical and political boundaries to concentrate members of a particular race, she said, “bears an uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid” and risks perpetuating “the very patterns of racial bloc voting that minority-majority districting is sometimes said to counteract.”

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  Party Lines

  Competition, Partisanship, and Congressional Redistricting

  • Thomas E. Mann, Bruce E. Cain, Thomas E. Mann, Bruce E. Cain(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Brookings Institution Press

    (Publisher)

  Reno and its progeny also tend to fall along a group rights–individual rights dimension. Here, however, it is less clear whether the rule of law in Shaw itself grows out of a preference for indi-vidual over group rights or emerges from five justices’ particular discomfort with the group-based (that is, excessively pro-minority) districts that the states created in those cases. The intentional creation of majority-minority districts, according to the Shaw majority, reinforces racial stereotypes and sends a message to representatives from those districts: “When a district obviously is created solely to effectuate the perceived common interests of one racial group, elected officials are more likely to believe that their pri-mary obligation is to represent only the members of that group, rather than their constituency as a whole.” 11 One difficulty with the Shaw opin-ions is that while they attack groupist gerrymandering, they fail to show that individual voters (minority or white, inside the gerrymandered district or outside) are injured by such gerrymanders. 12 While the cases themselves Judicial Review of the Redistricting Process 75 attack gerrymandering as a means to enforce group rights, their reliance on “expressive harms” (as Rick Pildes terms it 13 ) necessarily presumes some kind of society-wide reception of a signal from such gerrymanders, rather than any particular individual injury. The Redistricting Case Law: Where We Are and What We Have Done With the terms of the assorted debates in redistricting law explained, this section turns to the case law to see what the Court has wrought, describ-ing as briefly as possible the current state of the law in the various legal con-texts and presenting the consequences to the degree that they can be mea-sured.

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  Maximization, Whatever the Cost

  Race, Redistricting, and the Department of Justice

  • Maurice T. Cunningham(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  Page 107 where…. dragging that district all the way across the state, no wider than the interstate at times, was too much.” 44 Checked by the Democratic legislature’s ability to evade its successful influence upon the Division’s preclearance powers, North Carolina Republicans filed suit complaining of a partisan gerrymander. That suit was dismissed but individual Republican voters soon filed another suit challenging the state’s plan on statutory and constitutional grounds, in what eventuated in the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Shaw v Reno. After the decision in Reno caused the matter to be sent back to the federal district court in North Carolina for trial, the Republicans were open about their calculations in both testimony and closing arguments. Many members of the North Carolina legislature believed that the Department of Justice was acting out of partisan motives. Among the twists and turns that characterized voting rights in the nineties is that the Shaw litigation was commenced by Republican voters after the Party was frustrated that its successful efforts to induce DOJ intervention had been thwarted by Democratic racial gerrymandering. The individual challengers, however, received only sporadic assistance from formal Republican Party channels. 45 Many suspected, and continue to suspect, that the Division was used as part of a Republican Plot. The debate began almost as soon as the Voting Section’s review of submissions commenced. In an oped piece in the Washington Post on 23 September 1991, Abigail Thernstrom accused the Justice Department of complicity in a Republicancivil rights group alliance to maximize minority legislative seats.

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  The Law of Affirmative Action

  Twenty Five Years of Supreme Court Decisions on Race and Remedies

  • Girardeau A. Spann(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • NYU Press

    (Publisher)

  379

  Justice Souter suggested that, unless the Court was willing to overrule Shaw V. Reno , it had two options for clarifying the ambiguities created by its Shaw V. Reno cause of action. First, it could read Shaw V. Reno simply to impose shape restrictions on majority-minority districts, thereby eliminating the need to make more-problematic inquiries into the degree that racial considerations motivated particular districting decisions. Second, the Court could preclude the use of traditional districting principles that themselves rest on racial considerations, thereby requiring the use of randomly drawn districts in order to achieve color blindness.380 Justice Souter viewed the second option as subject to insurmountable objections. As long as the majority continued to engage in racial bloc voting, the color blindness that resulted from Shaw V. Reno would submerge minority votes and reproduce the minority vote dilution that the Voting Rights Act invalidates. Accordingly, the Court would have to invalidate the Voting Rights Act itself. Such a result would also be at odds with the Court’s insistence that Shaw V. Reno was not intended to preclude all consideration of race in the districting process. Only Justices Scalia and Thomas were prepared to extend Shaw V. Reno that far.381 It followed that only the first option was available, but reducing Shaw V. Reno to a case about the shape of voting districts would simply result in districting by the Supreme Court rather than state officials. Therefore, Justice Souter concluded that Shaw V. Reno should simply be overruled. The traditional districting principles that the Court claimed to favor had always accommodated ethnic considerations, and had served to increase the assimilation of ethnic minorities into the mainstream culture. There was no reason to believe that the same process would not work for racial minorities as well.382

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  Gerrymandering

  The Politics of Redistricting in the United States

  • Stephen K. Medvic(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  47 The plaintiffs in the case, a group of white voters, argued that the districts constituted racial gerrymandering and, thus, violated their voting rights.

  Though the Court did not reach a decision on the merits of the case (i.e., whether the districts violated the rights of the plaintiffs), it reversed and remanded the case to the district court, which had dismissed the plaintiff’s challenge. In so doing, the Court raised questions about the “bizarre” nature of at least one of the districts. Writing for the majority (in a 5–4 decision), Justice O’Connor questioned whether there was a rational basis for the districts, beyond race, and argued,

  A reapportionment plan that includes in one district individuals who belong to the same race, but who are otherwise widely separated by geographical and political boundaries, and who may have little in common with one another but the color of their skin, bears an uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid.48

  Majority-minority districts were not necessarily forbidden by Shaw. However, the barrier to creating constitutionally acceptable majority-minority districts had apparently been set quite high. Unfortunately, the Court did not offer clear guidance as to what was, and was not, acceptable with respect to creating districts that enhanced minority voting rights.49 It seemed to suggest that bizarrely drawn districts are problematic, but it never explained what makes a district bizarrely drawn.

  Not surprisingly, more lawsuits followed. In Miller v. Johnson (1995), the Court struck down Georgia’s majority-minority Eleventh Congressional District.50 In doing so, the Court was less interested in the shape of the district than with the intention of those who created the district. The main conclusion of Miller was that race cannot be the “predominant” factor motivating the drawing of district boundaries.51

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  The Supreme Court and American Democracy

  Case Studies on Judicial Review and Public Policy

  • Earl Pollock(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  But a correlative effect is to accord greater legitimacy to tradi- tional political tactics as an alternative explanation for gerrymandering a district. The Georgia Redistricting Two years after the decision in Shaw V. Reno, the decision was applied by the Supreme Court in Miller v. Johnson, 515 U.S. 900 (1995), to reject (5-4) a Georgia plan provid- ing for three majority-black congressional districts. The Georgia Legislature adopted the plan after the Justice Department refused to preclear, under §5 of the Voting Rights Act, two earlier plans that each contained only two majority-black districts. Voters in the new Eleventh District (which joined metro- politan black neighborhoods together with the poor black population of coastal areas 260 miles away) challenged the plan on the ground that the district was a racial gerry- mander in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. The Supreme Court declared that, “Just as the State may not, absent extraordinary justification, segregate citizens on the basis of race in its public parks, . . . buses, . . . golf courses, . . . beaches, . . . and schools, . . . so did we recognize in Shaw that it may 326 The Supreme Court and American Democracy not separate its citizens into different voting districts on the basis of race” (page 911). Further, “When the State assigns voters on the basis of race, it engages in the offensive and demeaning assumption that voters of a particular race, because of their race, ‘think alike, share the same political interests, and will prefer the same candidates at the polls’ ” (pages 911–912). Turning then to the record in the case, the Court found it unnecessary to base its decision on the district’s shape, considered separately, since there was substantial additional evidence showing that the Georgia Legislature was motivated by a predomi- nant, overriding purpose to create a third majority-black district in order to comply with the Justice Department’s preclearance demands.

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  Colorblind Injustice

  Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction

  • J. Morgan Kousser(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  Shaw V. Reno [1993], 2834–45, italics in original).

  Only slightly less outraged in tone than White’s opinion, Justice Souter’s dissent differentiated voting from other areas in which affirmative action had been struck down, questioned O’Connor’s use of precedents, and ridiculed her notion of diffuse cultural injury. Besides relying on Douglas’s dissent in Wright v. Rockefeller (1964), on a minor part of UJO, in an interpretation that the author of the opinion, Justice White, disavowed, and on a distorted analogy with Gomillion, O’Connor connected her Shaw opinion to a set of recent affirmative action and jury selection cases. Souter argued that they were inapplicable. In the affirmative action cases, favoring a minority contractor or employee, for instance, necessarily disadvantaged a white contractor or employee. In criminal cases, peremptory challenges of jurors of one race might bias the process against a particular defendant. By contrast, in voting, placing a person in one district as opposed to another did not deprive her of a vote, and so long as the political power of the group to which she belonged was not diluted, she could not prove a discriminatory impact. Moreover, to comply with the VRA , race had to be taken into account in districting in areas where there was evidence of racial bloc voting. In other words, Souter argued, federal law demanded classification by race, and if the Court did not mean to invalidate the VRA , which it did not hint at in Shaw, then states were faced with the choice of obeying the law passed by Congress or the contradictory interpretation of the Constitution mandated by the Court. It was for these reasons, according to Souter, that the Court had never before applied strict scrutiny in racial districting cases. In other areas of the law, any discrimination between was necessarily a discrimination against, but not in voting. Racial classification simply did not mean the same thing in voting as in previous types of cases, and therefore the precedents that O’Connor cited were irrelevant. Finally, argued Souter, the harms that O’Connor invoked were in no way similar to those in cases of disadvantage. It was “utterly implausible” to contend that the psychological impact of “this strangely-shaped majority-minority district” was comparable to what Brown had referred to as “a feeling of inferiority as to [African-Americans’] status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” “As for representative democracy,” Souter said, he had “difficulty seeing how it is threatened (indeed why it is not, rather, enhanced) by districts that are not even alleged to dilute anyone’s vote” (Shaw V. Reno

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