Mr. Beat presents
Supreme Court Briefs
North Carolina 1990
None of the state’s 11 Representatives in Congress are African American, despite the fact that 20% of the state’s population was.
As matter of fact, since the Civil War North Carolina had only elected a total of 4 African Americans to the U.S. House of Representatives.
After the 1990 census, North Carolina gained a district, so they were going to get a new Representative.
The state legislature was like, we need an African American to represent this district, so they intentionally created a district made up of mostly African Americans under the assumption they would vote one in.
After the legislature submitted their plans to the U.S. Department of Justice, Attorney General Janet Reno was like “nah, not good enough,” and rejected them, saying there needed to be another district where minorities would have a chance to represent constituents in order to comply with the Voting Rights Act.
So the state legislature went back to the drawing board, this time drawing up another district to help get another African American to represent North Carolina in Congress.
Now, this district was a bit...odd shaped.
I mean, just look at it here. It ran along Interstate 85 for 160 miles, breaking up counties and towns and grouping together places that typically were NOT grouped together.
In some places, the district was only as wide as the highway itself.
And well...wouldn’t you know it...in 1992 residents of both of those redrawn districts elected African Americans to represent them.
Both were North Carolina’s first African Americans to get into Congress in the 20th century.
Well this made some North Carolina folks upset, you could say.
They said that those districts were racially gerrymandered to get African Americans elected there.
In case you didn’t know, gerrymandering means manipulating how the boundaries of districts are drawn to either favor one group or hurt another group.
Gerrymandering is something of an infamous American tradition.
As much as Americans hate the practice, it’s been around since the early days of the country.
It was named after a dude named Elbridge Gerry (I know, his name is pronounced differently), who, as governor, signed the bill that approved a weirdly shaped district that benefitted his political party in the state of Massachusetts.
The district’s shape somewhat resembled a salamander. So get it?
Gerry which turned into Gerry plus salamander equals gerrymander?
Anyway, in this case, five North Carolina residents, led by a person named Ruth Shaw, sued both the state and the federal government, arguing that District 12, in particular, was gerrymandered so much that it went against the 14th Amendment’s tubular Equal Protection Clause.
Again, they argued it was racial gerrymandering, not partisan gerrymandering, and they argued the drawn district didn’t go against the “one person, one vote” established in the case Reynolds v. Sims.
Shaw and the rest took their case to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina.
The District Court simply dismissed the lawsuit, saying their hands were tied due to a previous case, United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburgh v. Carey.
Shaw and the rest appealed their decision to the Supreme Court, who heard oral arguments on April 20, 1993.
Arguments kept coming back to whether or not North Carolina’s redistricting plan went against the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Janet Reno’s defense team argued that The Voting Rights Act of 1965 encouraged creating districts where minorities were the majority, and that basically this was a form of affirmative action to help those groups historically discriminated against.
The Court reached their decision on June 28, 1993.
They sided with Shaw. It was 5-4.
They sent the case back to the lower court to see if the district could be justified in terms other than by the skin color of the residents who lived there.
The Court said that creating a district like District 12 based on strictly the color of skin of folks who lived in it was setting a dangerous precedent.
They argued that racial gerrymandering, even if it had noble intentions, you know...meant to prevent groups from being marginalized...it might cause representatives to only focus on the needs of certain constituents, not the entire group.
4 justices wrote separate dissents for this one.
Overall, they said they sided with Reno because that gerrymandering helped a group historically underrepresented in North Carolina.
They said people of the same skin color often share the same interests and often vote in the same way.
Also, in their minds, racial gerrymandering only went against the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment if the purpose of making those boundaries was to further give power to the group who already had the power.
But it was pretty clear African Americans from North Carolina didn’t have power in Congress.
Shaw v. Reno made gerrymandering on racial and ethnic grounds unconstitutional.
It is one of the most important Supreme Court cases in American history when it comes to gerrymandering, but today, partisan gerrymandering, or manipulating districts to favor one political party, is still a huge problem that most Americans are against.
Arnold Schwarzenegger: So that's why we are here
at the Supreme Court, to ask the Supreme Court
to help us fix this system
to get rid of this...kind of...
terrible gerrymandering
that is really a fixed system
where the politicians choose the voters
rather than the voters choosing the politicians
Unless a constitutional amendment bans gerrymandering, the Supreme Court will likely be revisiting the issue many times in the future.
I’ll see you for the next Supreme Court case, jury!
Gerrymandering...yeah...unfortunately it's still a huge problem
In fact, it's probably worse now than it ever has been in the history of the country.
But what do you think about this case? Do you think the Supreme Court was right on this one?
Let me know in the comments below.
And I want to give a special shout out to all my Patreon supporters.