districts in order to comply with the Voting Rights Act. that the white voters who brought the suit could not prove they had been injured in any way by the redistricting plan, and second, that the redistricting plan was an attempt to equalize treatment by providing minority voters with an effective voice in the political process, not an attempt to strip voting power from a particular group. JUSTICE WHITE WITH WHOM JUSTICE BLACKMUN AND JUSTICE STEVENS JOIN, DISSENTING. It therefore warrants different analysis. The voting age population of North Carolina is approximately 78% white, 20% black, and 1% Native American; the remaining 1% is predominantly Asian. 3 Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act requires a covered jurisdiction to demonstrate either to the Attorney General or to the District Court that each new districting plan "does not have the purpose and will not have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race[,] color, or [membership in a language minority.]" Finally, we must ask whether otherwise permissible redistricting to benefit an underrepresented minority group becomes impermissible when the minority group is defined by its race. -using race in redistricting is as important of it being continuous. 21-24 (Powell, J., joined by STEVENS, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part) (describing "grotesque gerrymandering" and "unusual shapes" drawn solely to deprive Democratic voters of electoral power). Did North Carolina residents claim that the 1990 redistricting plan discriminated on the basis of race raise a valid constitutional issue under the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause? Constitution prohibits using race as the basis for how to draw districts, 1. Bandemer, 478 U. S., at 164 (Powell, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part) (internal quotation marks omitted). Ruth Shaw and four other white North Carolina voters filed suit against the U.S. attorney general and various North Carolina officials, claiming that race-based redistricting violated, among other provisions, the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. e., an intent to aggravate "the unequal distribution of electoral power." Following is the Case Brief for Baker v. Carr, United States Supreme Court, (1962) Case Summary of Baker v. Carr: A Tennessee resident brought suit against the Secretary of State claiming that the failure to redraw the legislative districts every ten years, as outlined in the state constitution, resulted in rural votes holding more votes . 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 primary obligation is to represent only the members of that group, rather than their constituency as a whole. 657-658. As a result of the 1990 census, North Carolina became entitled to a 12th seat in the United States House of Representatives. Appellants allege that the revised plan, which contains district boundary lines of dramatically irregular shape, consti-. wide, the majority concluded that appellants had failed to state an equal protection claim. The Attorney General did not object to the General Assembly's revised plan. Even Justice Whit-. Under our cases there is in general a requirement that in order to obtain relief under the Fourteenth Amendment, the purpose and effect of the districting must be to devalue the effectiveness of a voter compared to what, as a group member, he would otherwise be able to enjoy. Thus. income. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483, 495 (1954). 5. JUSTICE O'CONNOR DELIVERED THE OPINION OF THE COURT. Cf. It is against this background that we confront the questions presented here. The Court expresses no view on whether appellants successfully could have challenged a district such as that suggested by the Attorney General or whether their complaint stated a claim under other constitutional provisions. They alleged that the two districts concentrated a majority of black voters arbitrarily without regard to considerations such as compactness, contiguousness, geographical boundaries, or political subdivisions, in order to create congressional districts along racial lines and to assure the election of two black representatives. Karcher v. Daggett, 462 U. S. 725, 755 (1983) (STEVENS, J., concurring) ("One need not use Justice Stewart's classic definition of obscenity-'I know it when I see it' -as an ultimate standard for judging the constitutionality of a gerrymander to recognize that dramatically irregular shapes may have sufficient probative force to call for an explanation" (footnotes omitted)). Every Member of the Court assumed that the plaintiffs' allegation that the statute "segregate[d] eligible voters by race and place of origin" stated a constitutional claim. Ante, at 646 (emphasis in original). Appellants, five North Carolina residents, filed this action against appellee state and federal officials, claiming that the State had created an unconstitutional racial gerrymander in violation of, among other things, the Fourteenth Amendment. APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF NORTH CAROLINA. Lacking support in any of the Court's precedents, the majority's novel type of claim also makes no sense. After the Attorney General of the United States objected to the plan pursuant to 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, 79 Stat. Of particular relevance, five of the Justices reasoned that members of the white majority could not plausibly argue that their influence over the political process had been unfairly canceled, see id., at 165-168 (opinion of WHITE, J., joined by REHNQUIST and STEVENS, JJ. All citizens may register, vote, and be represented. Disregard for geographic divisions and compactness often goes hand in hand with partisan gerrymandering. As for this latter category, we. 1984); and, finally, the "concentration of [minority voters] into districts where they constitute an excessive majority," Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U. S. 30, 46, n. 11 (1986), also called "packing," Voinovich, supra, at 153. 506 U. S. 801 (1992). That it may be difficult to determine from the face of a single-member districting plan that it makes such a distinction does not mean that a racial gerrymander, once established, should receive less scrutiny than other legislation classifying citizens by race. Petitioner Argument (Shaw) 1. Wright illustrates the difficulty of determining from the face of a single-member districting plan that it purposefully distinguishes between voters on the basis of race. Id., at 180 (Stewart, J., joined by Powell, J., concurring in judgment). Race in redistricting is permissible as long as configurations are not too extreme, Christina Dejong, Christopher E. Smith, George F Cole, Government in America: Elections and Updates Edition, George C. Edwards III, Martin P. Wattenberg, Robert L. Lineberry. Statement 89a-90a; see also Brief for Appellants 31-32. Under 5, the State remained free to seek a declaratory judgment from the District Court for the District of Columbia notwithstanding the Attorney General's objection. Two judges also concluded that, to the extent appellants challenged the Attorney General's preclearance decisions, their claim was foreclosed by this Court's holding in Morris v. Gressette, 432 U. S. 491 (1977). It may be that the terms for pleading this cause of action will be met so rarely that this case will wind up an aberration. Instead, the General Assembly enacted a revised redistricting plan, 1991 N. C. Extra Sess. As for representative democracy, I have 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. Where members of a racial minority group vote as a cohesive unit, practices such as multimember or atlarge electoral systems can reduce or nullify minority voters' ability, as a group, "to elect the candidate of their choice." Congress, too, responded to the problem of vote dilution. In the Attorney General's view, the General Assembly could have created a second majorityminority district "to give effect to black and Native American voting strength in this area" by using boundary lines "no more irregular than [those] found elsewhere in the proposed plan," but failed to do so for "pretextual reasons." See App. Centered in the northeast portion of the State, it moves southward until it tapers to a narrow band; then, with finger-like extensions, it reaches far into the southernmost part of the State near the South Carolina border. See Wright v. Rockefeller, 211 F. Supp. But even recast as a Fourteenth Amendment case, Gomillion does not assist the majority, for its focus was on the alleged effect of the city's action, which was to exclude black voters from the municipality of Tuskegee. Drawing on the "one person, one vote" principle, this Court recognized that "[t]he right to vote can be affected by adilutionof voting power as well as by an absolute prohibition on casting a ballot." The principle of equality is at war with the notion that District A must be represented by a Negro, as it is with the notion that District B must be represented by a Caucasian, District C by a Jew, District D by a Catholic, and so on. That system, by whatever name it is called, is a divisive force in a community, emphasizing differences between candidates and voters that are irrelevant in the constitutional sense. "When racial or religious lines are drawn by the State, the multiracial, multireligious communities that our Constitution seeks to weld together as one become separatist; antagonisms that relate to race or to religion rather than to political issues are generated; communities seek not the best representative but the best racial or religious partisan. and by him referred to the Court in No. Clause" (internal quotation marks omitted)); see also Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Co., 500 U. S. 614, 630-631 (1991) ("If our society is to continue to progress as a multiracial democracy, it must recognize that the automatic invocation of race stereotypes retards that progress and causes continued hurt and injury"). And when race is used to supplant seniority in layoffs, someone is laid off who would not be otherwise. Supp., at 472. District 1 has been compared to a "Rorschach ink-blot test," Shaw v. Barr, 808 F. Supp. As Justice Douglas explained in his dissent in Wright v. Rockefeller nearly 30 years ago: "Here the individual is important, not his race, his creed, or his color. To be sure, as the Court says, it would be logically possible to apply strict scrutiny to these cases (and to uphold those uses of race that are permissible), see ante, at 653-657. 808 F. You already receive all suggested Justia Opinion Summary Newsletters. The dissenters thought the unusual. A state must prove a compelling interest in order to survive a legal challenge to the redistricting plan. 2. Ante, at 652. The shape of the district at issue in this case is indeed so bizarre that few other examples are ever likely to carry the unequivocal implication of impermissible use of race that the Court finds here. 461 (EDNC 1992). It is for these reasons that race-based districting by our state legislatures demands close judicial scrutiny. See ante, at 652 (acknowledging that "UJO set forth a standard under which white voters can establish unconstitutional vote dilution"). Id., at 154-155. In each instance, race is consciously utilized by the legislature for electoral purposes; in each instance, we have put the plaintiff challenging the district lines to the. The principle of equality is at war with the notion that District A must be represented by a Negro, as it is with the notion that District B must be represented by a Caucasian, District C by a Jew, District D by a Catholic, and so on . That system, by whatever name it is called, is a divisive force in a community, emphasizing differences between candidates and voters that are irrelevant in the constitutional sense . "When racial or religious lines are drawn by the State, the multiracial, multireligious communities that our Constitution seeks to weld together as one become separatist; antagonisms that relate to race or to religion rather than to political issues are generated; communities seek not the best representative but the best racial or religious partisan. On the same reasoning, I would affirm the District Court's dismissal of appellants' claim in this instance. Shaw V. Reno Civil Liberties vs Civil Rights 17th Amendment 2nd Amendment 3rd Amendment 4th Amendment Bostock v Clayton County District of Columbia v. Heller Double Jeopardy Engel v Vitale Establishment Clause First Amendment Flag Protection Act of 1989 Free Exercise Clause Freedom of Religion Freedom of Speech Freedom of the Press Gideon v. Accordingly, we reverse the judgment of the District Court and remand the case for further proceedings consistent with this opinion. As we have explained, however, reapportionment legislation that cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to classify and separate voters by race injures voters in other ways. When an assumption that people in a particular minority group (whether they are defined by the political party, religion, ethnic group, or race to which they belong) will vote in a particular way is used to benefit that group, no constitutional violation occurs. 16-19. As we have held, one's constitutional rights are not violated merely because the candidate one supports loses the election or because a group (including a racial group) to which one belongs winds up with a representative from outside that group. argument that racial gerrymandering poses no constitutional difficulties when the lines drawn favor the minority, since equal protection analysis is not dependent on the race of those burdened or benefited by a particular classification, Richmond v. J. If not, it does not. Justia Annotations is a forum for attorneys to summarize, comment on, and analyze case law published on our site. The court agreed unanimously that it lacked subject matter jurisdiction by reason of 14(b) of the Voting Rights Act, 42 U. S. C. 1973l(b), which vests the District Court for the District of Columbia with exclusive jurisdiction to issue injunctions against the execution of the Act and to enjoin actions taken by federal officers pursuant thereto. A. Croson Co., 488 U. S. 469, 493 (1989) (plurality opinion); id., at 520 (SCALIA, J., concurring in judgment); see also UJO, 430 U. S., at 172 (Brennan, J., concurring in part) ("[A] purportedly preferential race assignment may in fact disguise a policy that perpetuates disadvantageous treatment of the plan's supposed beneficiaries"). Gaffney v. Cummings, 412. Laws that explicitly distinguish between individuals on racial grounds fall within the core of that prohibition. Classifications of citizens on the basis of race "are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality." This case involves two of the most complex and sensitive issues this Court has faced in recent years: the meaning of the constitutional "right" to vote, and the propriety of race-based state legislation designed to benefit members of historically disadvantaged racial minority groups. Appellants allege that the revised plan, which contains district boundary lines of dramatically irregular shape, constitutes an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Put differently, we believe that reapportionment is one area in which appearances do matter. H. Lefler & A. Newsom, The History of a Southern State: North Carolina 18-22 (3d ed. The required return on the companys new equity is 14%. Explain New York free trade zone class codes. 408 (E.D.N.C. In other words, North Carolina was found by Congress to have" 'resorted to the extraordinary stratagem of contriving new rules of various kinds for the sole purpose of perpetuating voting discrimination in the face of adverse federal court decrees'" and therefore "would be likely to engage in 'similar maneuvers in the future in order to evade the remedies for voting discrimination contained in the Act itself.'" The shape of the district at issue in this case is indeed so bizarre that few other examples are ever likely to carry the unequivocal implication of impermissible use of race that the Court finds here. JUSTICE SOUTER'S reasoning is flawed. JOHN H. MERRILL, ALABAMA SECRETARY OF STATE, ET AL. c. Answer the questions in part (b) for the minimum body temperature during the 24-hour period. Rule Civ. Bush administration rejected this plan on the grounds that it gave blacks insufficient congressional representation. It may therefore be that few electoral districting cases are ever likely to employ the strict scrutiny the Court holds to be applicable on remand if appellants' allegations are "not contradicted." Pp. 653-657. With him on the briefs were Michael F. Easley, Attorney General of North Carolina, Edwin M. Speas, Jr., Senior, Deputy Attorney General, and Norma S. Harrell and Tiare B. Smiley, Special Deputy Attorneys General. In the meantime, our human resources manager will send you an application form. The Attorney General's interposition of a 5 objection "properly is viewed" as "an administrative finding of discrimination" against a racial minority. The facts of this case mirror those presented in United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburgh, Inc. v. Carey, 430 U. S. 144 (1977) (UJO), where the Court rejected a claim that creation of a majority-minority district violated the Constitution, either as a per se matter or in light of the circumstances leading to the creation of such a district. Shaw appealed. Explain in words and with a diagram. Croson Co.(1989) (city contracting);Wygant v. Jackson Bd. Of course the Court has not held that the disadvantaging effect of these uses of race can never be justified by a sufficiently close relationship to a sufficiently strong state interest. Other decisions of this Court adhere to the same standards. In a similar vein, Justice Stewart was joined by Justice Powell in stating: "The petitioners have made no showing that a racial criterion was used as a basis for denying them their right to vote, in contravention of the Fifteenth Amendment. Nor, because of the distinctions between the two categories, is there any risk that Fourteenth Amendment districting law as such will be taken to imply anything for purposes of general Fourteenth Amendment scrutiny about "benign" racial discrimination, or about group entitlement as distinct from individual protection, or about the appropriateness of strict or other heightened scrutiny. Complaint' 29, App. The new district stretches approximately 160 miles along Interstate 85 and, for much of its length, is no wider than the 1-85 corridor. John Paul . For much of our Nation's history, that right sadly has been denied to many because of race. A. Thernstrom, Whose Votes Count? The only other case invoked by the majority is Wright v. Rockefeller, supra. Although the boundary lines were somewhat irregular, the majority reasoned, they were not so bizarre as to permit of no other conclusion. Cf. Sign up for our free summaries and get the latest delivered directly to you. 4 The Court's opinion suggests that African-Americans may now be the only group to which it is unconstitutional to offer specific benefits from redistricting. See App. The Court today answers this question in the affirmative, and its answer is wrong. Seeing no good reason to engage in either, I dissent. See Personnel Administrator of Mass. Because the holding is limited to such anomalous circumstances, it perhaps will not substantially hamper a State's legitimate efforts to redistrict in favor of racial minorities. After the 1990 census, the North Carolina General Assembly was entitled to a 12th seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and redrew its congressional districts to account for the changes in population. Given two districts drawn on similar, race-based grounds, the one does not become more injurious than the other simply by virtue of being snakelike, at least so far as the Constitution is concerned and absent any evidence of differential racial impact. Tr. of Gal. (Assume there is no difference between the pretax and aftertax accounts payable cost.). the question in gerrymandering cases is "whether a particular group has been unconstitutionally denied its chance to effectively influence the political process," id., at 132-133. United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburgh, Inc. v. Carey, 430 U. S. 144, 161-162 (1977) (UJO) (pluralityopinion of WHITE, J., joined by Brennan, BLACKMUN, and STEVENS, JJ. Our focus is on appellants' claim that the State engaged in unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. In the 17th, 19th, and 20th Districts, whites constituted respectively 94.9%, 71.5%, and 72.5% of the population. Statement, O. T. 1991, No. Syllabus. Five of the eight Justices who participated in the decision resolved the case under the framework the Court previously had adopted for vote-dilution cases. In providing the reasons for the objection, the Attorney General noted that "[f]or the south-central to southeast area, there were several plans drawn providing for a second majority-minority congressional district" and that such a district would have been no more irregular than others in the State's plan. O'CONNOR, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which REHNQUIST, C. J., and SCALIA, KENNEDY, and THOMAS, JJ., joined. shape of the district lines could "be explained only in racial terms." " In Shaw v. Reno (1993), the Court ruled that electoral districts whose boundaries cannot be explained except on the basis of race can be challenged as potential violations of the equal protection clause, and in Miller v. Johnson (1995) it held that the equal protection clause Read More opinion of O'Connor In Sandra Day O'Connor v. RENO, ATTORNEY GENERAL, ET AL. 639-652. a majority-minority district does not unfairly minimize the voting power of any other group, the Constitution does not justify, much less mandate, such obstruction. The majority, however, accepted the District Court's finding that the plaintiffs had failed to establish that the districts were in fact drawn on racial lines. ); id., at 179-180 (Stewart, J., joined by Powell, J., concurring in judgment). To comply with Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, North Carolina submitted a congressional reapportionment plan with one majority-black district to the U.S. Attorney General. On the same reasoning, I would affirm the District Court's dismissal of appellants' claim in this instance. Ostensibly race-neutral devices such as literacy tests with "grandfather" clauses and "good character" provisos were devised to deprive black voters of the franchise. Freedom of Speech, Assembly, and Association.