There is much good-government mourning over the Senate retirements that will end some of Washington’s most famously nonideological Republican and Democratic careers next year. They were angels, these Mark Hatfields and Sam Nunns, always rescuing the infant compromise from a legislative building engulfed by partisan flames. And soon they will be gone, just as so many House moderates went before them last November. Who will save the baby now? And why has “the system” stopped producing such heroic, temperate folk?
It’s a disingenuous lament. Some among the current bumper crop of retirees are widely admired for skill and character. They will be missed on that basis, as individuals. But as a governing ideal, the dying “moderate tradition” in Congress leaves behind no loving widows — only some very partisan Democrats, distressed to lose a few more potential votes against the Republican majority’s newly aggressive, conservative tide. If that tide were flowing in the opposite direction, if national politics favored them, you can bet Democrats would be pressing their advantage to the max, without all that weepy concern for the Capitol’s “unnatural” new divisiveness.
Want proof? Consider the Democratic party’s position before the Supreme Court last week in two major voting rights cases. At issue is the construction of tortuously complicated electoral districts that provide safe House seats for more black and Hispanic officials. It’s the one recent structural innovation that probably will, over time, work to produce an unnatural polarization of our politics. But the Democratic party couldn’t care less. In both suits now before the court, the Clinton Justice Department and the Democratic National Committee vigorously defend the racial gerrymander.
Following the 1990 census, the Bush administration, at its nadir of cynicism, began interpreting the Voting Rights Act to require the creation of new electoral jurisdictions in which a majority of the voting-age population belongs to minority groups. Civil rights activists had long sought such a result, believing as they did (and do) that minority candidates will almost never win in white-majority districts and that minority voters are essentially disenfranchised because of it. And Republicans were suddenly prepared to exploit this ugly theory for the partisan opportunity it seemed to promise.
African Americans are the most reliable Democratic voters. If they are concentrated in a limited number of jurisdictions, there will be fewer Democratic votes in a state’s remaining districts. And, therefore, more Republican congressmen. So Republican computers worked overtime to generate the serpentine, slate-by-state district maps that mighl artificially increase membership in the Congressional Black Caucus. And Republican and NAACP lawyers persuaded a series of state legislatures to adopt those maps.
Did it work? Did the racial gerrymander make 1994’s Republican congressional victory possible? The “bleached” congressional districts that were left behind once black voters were bunched into “majority-minority” enclaves surely did not hurt Republican candidates. In House districts whose black voting-age population declined after redistricting, Republicans won every open seat in the country last year — and lost all but one in districts whose black population rose. And in at least a small number of close-fought House races, “whiter” districts clearly helped tip the balance in the GOP’s direction.
But it is also true that the current Republican House of Representatives is derived from exactly the same district boundaries that generated a 41-seat Democratic majority in 192. Republicans enjoyed astonishing, sweeping success last year in Senate and gubernatorial races — campaigns in which congressional districting lines were entirely irrelevant. Big, potentially realigning elections do happen sometimes. Something more than computerized cartography was necessary to make Newt Gingrich speaker.
For two years now, the Supreme Court has looked askance at the use of race as the “predominant factor” in the creation of electoral districts. Defenders of the racial gerrymander now struggle to prove that it serves non-race- conscious interests, as well. It protects a state’s incumbents, they say. Which incumbents? “Functional” incumbents, the DNC calls them — the black freshmen who become incumbents only after district lines are specially drawn to elect them. In essence, the Democratic party, against its own broad electoral interests but terrified to alienate its minority activist constituents, now argues that white Democratic incumbents threatened by racial gerrymanders — the immediate losers here — are comparatively worthless to their states.
Admirers of the Republican House that has arisen in the wake of this mostly intra-Democratic struggle might ask: What’s the problem? There’s a big one. Our political tradition insists on a realm of national interest that transcends even the most necessary partisan and ideological combat. And so we do not dispense legislative representation to groups — or races — in direct proportion to their numbers. We ask our citizens to think with their heads, not with their skin, and our legislative apportionment is based on something much more benign and fluid: where people live.
The racial gerrymander rejects this tradition of shifting, temporary coalitions in favor of the most fractious politics imaginable. Its enactment is an offcial signal that black Americans have black interests, white Americans have white ones, and that politicians cannot-in fact, need not – – represent more than one set of interests at a time. As a blow to American political moderation, this is a rather more significant development than Mark Hatfield’s retirement.
To RNC chairman Haley Barbour’s credit, the Republican party, which did so much to father this travesty, has now withdrawn its official support of racial redistricting. Conservative lawyers now argue against the idea before the Supreme Court. And the Republican Congress, one hopes, will eventually move to clarify that the Voting Rights Act does not require — indeed, forbids — gerrymandering for the purpose of allocating “black” and “white” House members.
And Democrats? Do they really believe their current eulogies for a politics not of “us and them” but “all together?” Not now, they don’t. That claim won’t be honest until the Democratic party drops its support for race-based congressional districting.
David Tell, for the Editors
