Court finds gerrymandering is in tune with democracy

Justice Potter Stewart, talking about hard-core pornography in 1964, said he didn't know exactly how to define it, but he knew it when he saw it. That was back in the day when Supreme Court justices struggled to identify a complicated injustice and find a way to correct it.
Today's justices, faced with such a challenge, seem all too willing to throw up their hands and announce that they have no business dabbling in complicated political matters. Which is what they did in the blatant case of gerrymandering by the Texas Legislature.
The court ruled that the nation's 50 states may redraw their congressional districts as often as they like and for whatever reason they like -- absent a specific state law to the contrary.
DeLay's heavy hand
The decision was rendered in a Texas case made notorious by former House GOP leader Tom DeLay, the architect of a redistricting plan that cost four Democrats their seats and changed the state's congressional delegation from majority Democratic to majority Republican.
The U.S. Constitution requires that congressional seats be reapportioned after the decennial census, and traditionally that's when it was done. But the justices said that there was no specific constitutional prohibition on doing it more often. In the Texas case, Delay, then the most powerful Republican in the House, shook down contributors for campaign contributions that were funneled into Texas state races. After DeLay managed to wrest control of the state Legislature from the Democrats, his newly empowered allies returned the favor by redrawing the state's congressional districts in such a way that Texas picked up four new Republican seats. Those seats helped Delay maintain Republican control of the House.
Sending a bad signal
In taking a hands-off approach, the Supreme Court runs the risk of being responsible for an orgy of reapportionment in many states that have thus far shown restraint.
It is difficult to pretend that what happened in Texas was a demonstration of how democracy is supposed to function and how the sanctity of one person, one vote is supposed to be protected. It's interesting to speculate as to how this court would have read the case had it been Democrats in a blue state divvying up districts in a way that disenfranchised Republicans.
Of course gerrymandering has gone on since the earliest days of the republic. The term dates to 1812 when political allies of Elbridge Gerry, a former governor of Massachusetts, divided the state into districts designed to protect his party. Gilbert Stuart, the painter, remarked to a newspaper editor that one district looked like a salamander. The editor suggested a better word: gerrymander.
For nearly 150 years, gerrymandering was pursued with relative abandon. The Supreme Court first exercised its authority to rein in the practice in the early 1960s in response to efforts by some southern states to disenfranchise newly energized black voters during the civil rights movement.
Giving 'sordid' a new meaning
Actually, while the court ruled 6-3 last week to give the Texas Legislature broad discretion in gerrymandering, a narrow majority of the court ruled separately that one of the districts was improperly drawn because it tended to disenfranchise Hispanic voters.
But the days of using the Constitution to protect voters against such political violence may be numbered. Writing in dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts was highly offended by the majority's reading of the case."It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race," Roberts wrote. Indeed it is. But it was the legislators who decided to divvy the state up, using race as one of the factors.
Roberts sees the correction of the wrong as more sordid than the wrong itself. Minority Americans should be worried about which future cases inspire Roberts to draw on the S word.