Recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings against the excessive use of race in drawing congressional and state legislative district lines could eventually impact Mississippi if some group decides to go to court on the issue.
In a 5-3 ruling a few days ago, the court ruled that racial considerations pervaded the way North Carolina lawmakers drew congressional maps after the 2010 census in order to maximize Republican advantage. It’s the latest in a series of similar decisions by the justices against the excessive use of race in drawing district lines. Alabama and Virginia are two other states where gerrymandering based on race has been or is being challenged.
Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas joined the court’s four liberal justices in striking down the North Carolina congressional maps in a ruling that was applauded by Democrats, such as former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, and criticized by some conservatives.
Hans von Spakovsky of the conservative Heritage Foundation said the ruling compounds “the confused state of the law” where “the Supreme Court says race can be a factor in redistricting but not the predominant factor, a rule that is so vague, so broad and so lacking in definable legal standard that it is really not a rule at all.”
He has a point. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 forbids diluting minority voting strength by spreading it across district lines so that black or other minority candidates have little chance of being elected. As that provision has been interpreted over the years by the U.S. Justice Department and the federal courts, some districts have been drawn with such large concentrations of minority voters that only minority candidates are likely to ever be elected from them.
The recent legal challenges such as the one in North Carolina argue that state legislatures are now overdoing it, packing African-American voters into already overwhelmingly black districts and thus minimizing their influence in all the others.
It’s an argument that could certainly be made in Mississippi.
For example, look at a map of the 2nd and 3rd congressional districts in Mississippi. The 3rd District stretches diagonally from Louisiana to Alabama, including towns as geographically far apart as McComb, Natchez and Starkville. It includes Republican-leaning areas of the Jackson area but not much of the Jackson area in Hinds County, which is predominantly African-American. Those black areas are in the 2nd District, which includes the Delta and much of western Mississippi, excluding Natchez and Woodville.
Because voting in Mississippi continues largely along racial lines, the election boundaries all but guarantee the election of a black Democrat in the 2nd District and a white Republican in the 3rd. It would make more geographic sense to redraw the lines to put more black voters in the 3rd District, but that isn’t likely to happen as long as Republicans are in charge of redistricting. And, to be fair, there haven’t been many complaints about the configuration of the 2nd District from veteran Rep. Bennie Thompson, the only black member of the congressional delegation, who is easily re-elected every two years.
The question is whether someone will go to court over Mississippi districts. Maybe it won’t happen. A lot of people, especially those in office, like it as it is.
