Segregation Forever? Where the GOP and the Black Caucus link arms.(Republicans support racial gerrymandering)

It isn't every day that GOP operatives cheer on the liberal wing of the Supreme Court. Yet many of them couldn't have been happier on April 18, when Justice Sandra Day O'Connor abandoned her longstanding skepticism about racial gerrymandering in a North Carolina redistricting dispute. The Republican National Committee now may proceed with one of its key tasks before next year's elections: encouraging state-level Republicans to pack as many blacks as possible into the smallest number of congressional districts, thus making more GOP-leaning white voters available for placement in swing districts.

This clever strategy represents perhaps the only issue on which the GOP can make-and has made-common cause with the Congressional Black Caucus. The endangered species here is the white Democrat. Some analysts even believe it wasn't President Clinton's health-care disaster or Newt Gingrich's Contract with America that led to the Republican election sweep of 1994, but the shakeout from the redistricting following the 1990 census: The number of black members of Congress shot up, and so did the number of Republicans. The results were most dramatic in the South. There, seats held by black Democrats rose from 13 to 17. At the same time, Republicans gained 27 seats, and grabbed a majority from the region for the first time since Reconstruction.

But this racial gerrymandering came under heavy fire from the Supreme Court; on several occasions, a 5-4 majority struck down oddly shaped House districts that had been configured for the specific purpose of creating safe seats for black politicians. With the unexpected O'Connor flip in Easley v. Cromartie, however, there is suddenly a 5-4 consensus for the opposite view: The woman who once said race-based redistricting threatened to "balkanize" the country has softened her stance. O'Connor essentially found some wiggle room for race to play a role in redistricting. The decision itself was narrow, focusing on questions of evidence, but there's no doubt Republicans will try to squeeze every advantage out of it to make sure districts are either as black or as white as they can be.

In another day, this was called "segregation." It was wrong then, and it's wrong now.

Racial gerrymandering is exactly the sort of color-conscious public policy that Republicans should fight against. In its finer moments, the GOP opposes racial preferences and set-aside contracts; it ought to declare war on race-driven redistricting as well. Justice Clarence Thomas's most eloquent opinions have been on this subject, and, in his Easley dissent, he reiterated his views with a forceful simplicity: "Racial gerrymandering offends the Constitution."

That line of thinking may satisfy conservatives, who normally try to elevate principles over politics-but it may not please Republicans, who don't always have time for such niceties as they cast nervous glances at the next election. Racial gerrymandering may not be something all Republicans want to support, but if it helps their interests as a party-and thereby advances the principles that motivate their politics in the first place-then perhaps, they believe, the deal is worth it.

What they don't appreciate is how much racial gerrymandering may hurt them, in a strictly political sense. Much has been written and said already about President Bush's disastrously low vote totals among blacks last November; he carried a pathetic 9 percent of these voters. Just how bad was this? Consider: Bush actually won about as many gay votes (roughly one-quarter support from 4 percent of the electorate) as black ones (nearly one-tenth support from 10 percent). If Republicans could just raise their performance among blacks nationally from the abysmal Bush level to a merely mediocre 30 percent-about where it was for Richard Nixon in 1960-they would deliver a catastrophic blow to the Democrats.