Opinion ID: 118040
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Intent

Text: 159 Perhaps conscious that noncompact congressional districts are the rule rather than the exception in Texas, the plurality suggests, ante, at __-__, __-__, that the real key is the direct evidence, particularly in the form of Texas' § 5 Voting Rights Act submissions and the person of then-State Senator Johnson, that the State expressed an intent to create these districts with a given ''minimum percentage of the favored minority.'' 861 F.Supp., at 1309. Even if it were appropriate to rest this test of dominance on an examination of the subjective motivation of individual legislators, 23 or on testimony given in a legal proceeding designed to prove a conflicting conclusion, 24 this information does little more than confirm that the State believed it necessary to comply with the Voting Rights Act. Given its reasonable understanding of its legal responsibilities, see supra, at __-__, the legislature acted to ensure that its goal of creating a majority-black district in Dallas County was not undermined by the changes made to accommodate District 30 to other, race-neutral districting principles. As the plurality admits, see ante, at __, the intent to create majority-minority districts does not in itself trigger strict scrutiny; these admissions prove nothing more than that. See also Shaw II, --- U.S., at ---- - ----, 116 S.Ct., at ---- - ---- (STEVENS, J., dissenting). Nonracial Factors: Community 160 In an effort to provide a definitive explanation for the odd shape of the district, the State emphasized two factors: The presence of communities of interest tying together the populations of the district, and the role of incumbency protection. The District Court and the plurality improperly dismissed these considerations as ultimately irrelevant to the shape of the districts. 161 First, the appellants presented testimony that the districts were drawn to align with certain communities of interest, such as land use, family demographics, and transportation corridors. See 861 F.Supp., at 1322-1323. Although the District Court recognized that these community characteristics amounted to accurate descriptions of District 30, id., at 1323, it dismissed them as irrelevant to the districting process, concluding that there was no evidence that ''the Legislature had these particular 'communities of interest' in mind when drawing the boundaries of District 30.'' Ibid. The plurality concludes that petitioners present no reason to displace that conclusion. Ante, at __. 162 I do not understand why we should require such evidence ever to exist. It is entirely reasonable for the legislature to rely on the experience of its members when drawing particular boundaries rather than on clearly identifiable ''evidence'' presented by demographers and political scientists. Most of these representatives have been members of their communities for years. Unless the Court intends to interfere in state political processes even more than it has already expressed an intent to do, I presume that it does not intend to require States to create a comprehensive administrative record in support of their redistricting process. State legislators should be able to rely on their own experience, not only prepared reports. To the extent that the presence of obvious communities of interest among members of a district explicitly or implicitly guided the shape of District 30, it amounts to an entirely legitimate non-r acial consideration. 25 Nonracial Factors: Incumbency 163 The plurality admits that the appellants ''present a . . . substantial case for their claim that incumbency protection rivalled race in determining the district's shape.'' Ante, at __. Every individual who participated in the redistricting process knew that incumbency protection was a critical factor in producing the bizarre lines and, as the plurality points out, ante, at __, even the District Court recognized that this nearly exclusive focus on the creation of ''safe'' districts for incumbents was intimately related to the bizarre shape of district lines throughout the State. 164 ''[I]n Texas in 1991, many incumbent protection boundaries sabotaged traditional redistricting principles as they routinely divided counties, cities, neighborhoods, and regions. For the sake of maintaining or winning seats in the House of Representatives, Congressmen or would-be Congressmen shed hostile groups and potential opponents by fencing them out of their districts. The Legislature obligingly carved out districts of apparent supporters of incumbents, . . . and then added appendages to connect their residences to those districts. The final result seems not one in which the people select their representatives, but in which the representatives have selected the people.'' 861 F.Supp., at 1334 (citations and footnotes omitted). 165 See also id., at 1335, n. 43. Despite this overwhelming evidence that incumbency protection was the critical motivating factor in the creation of the bizarre Texas districts, the District Court reached the stunning conclusion that because the process was so ''different in degree'' from the ''generalized, and legitimate, goal of incumbent and seniority protection'' that this Court has previously recognized, it could not serve as a legitimate explanation for the bizarre boundaries of the congressional districts. Id., at 1334-1335. In dismissing incumbency protection once and for all, the District Court stated that ''[i]ncumbent protection is a valid state interest only to the extent that it is not a pretext for unconstitutional racial gerrymandering.'' Id., at 1336. 166 It is difficult to know where to begin to attack the misperceptions reflected in these conclusions, 26 and the plurality's failure to do so seriously taints its evaluation of the relative importance of nonracial considerations in the creation of District 30. The initial problem, of course, is that under the Court's threshold test as set forth in Miller, one must consider the role of incumbency protection before determining whether there is an ''unconstitutional racial gerrymander.'' And because the ultimate focus in these gerrymandering cases is the claim that race was the ''dominant and controlling rationale in drawing [the] district lines,'' 515 U.S., at ----, 115 S.Ct., at 2480-2481, a court must, in applying that test, consider a State's claim that a given race-neutral rationale controlled the creation of those lines. See id., at ----, 115 S.Ct., at 2488 (''Where [compactness, contiguity,] or other race-neutral considerations are the basis for redistricting legislation, and are not subordinated to race, a State can 'defeat a claim that a district has been gerrymandered on racial lines' ''). Although a court may not like the State's explanation, that is no excuse for ignoring it. 167 If some independent bar prevented the use of that race-neutral criterion, then the District Court might be in a position to object to the State's use of it. We have, however, affirmed that a State has an interest in incumbency protection, see, e.g., ante, at __ (opinion of O'CONNOR, J.); White v. Weiser, 412 U.S. 783, 791, 797, 93 S.Ct. 2348, 2352-2353, 2355-2356, 37 L.Ed.2d 335 (1973), and also assured States that the Constitution does not require compactness, contiguity, or respect for political borders, see Shaw I, 509 U.S., at 647, 113 S.Ct., at 2826-2827. While egregious political gerrymandering may not be particularly praiseworthy, see infra, at __, it may nonetheless provide the race-neutral explanation necessary for a State to avoid strict scrutiny of the district lines where gerrymandering is the ''dominant and controlling'' explanation for the odd district shapes. 27 168 The District Court's error had an apparently dispositive effect on its assessment of whether strict scrutiny should apply at all. Although aspects of our dispute with the plurality are ''largely factual,'' ante, at __, n. , they arise not out of our disagreement with the District Court's credibility assessments, but out of that court's erroneous conclusion that the state's overwhelming reliance on this race-neutral factor was illegitimate and irrelevant to its evaluation of the factors involved in the shifting of this District's lines. A fair evaluation of the record made in light of appropriate legal standards requires a conclusion very different from the District Court's. By following the District Court down its misdirected path, the Court itself goes astray. Race as a Proxy 169 Faced with all this evidence that politics, not race, was the predominant factor shaping the district lines, the plurality ultimately makes little effort to contradict appellants' assertions that incumbency protection was far more important in the placement of District 30's lines than race. See ante, at __. Instead, it adopts a fall-back position based on an argument far removed from even the ''analytically distinct'' claim set forth in Shaw I, 509 U.S., at 652, 113 S.Ct., at 2829-2830. In it, the Court suggests that even if the predominant reason for the bizarre features of the majority-minority districts was incumbency protection, the State impermissibly used race as a proxy for determining the likely political affiliation of blocks of voters. See ante, at __-__ (opinion of O'CONNOR, J.). 170 The effect of this process, in all likelihood, was relatively unimportant to the overall shape of the district. A comparison of the 1992 precinct results with a depiction of the proportion of black population in each census block reveals that Democratic-leaning precincts cover a far greater area than majority-black census blocks. Compare State's Exh. 9A with State's Exh. 45. One would expect the opposite effect if the single-minded goal of those drawing the districts was racial composition rather than political affiliation. At the very least, the maps suggest that the drawing of boundaries involves a demographic calculus far more complex than simple racial stereotyping. 171 Furthermore, to the extent that race served as a proxy at all, it did so merely as a means of ''fine tuning'' borders that were already in particular locations for primarily political reasons. This ''fine tuning'' through the use of race is, of course, little different from the kind of fine tuning that could have legitimately occurred around the edges of a compact majority-minority district. 28 I perceive no reason why a legitimate process--choosing minority voters for inclusion in a majority-minority district--should become suspect once nonracial considerations force district lines away from its core.. 172 Finally, I note that in most contexts racial classifications are invidious because they are irrational. For example, it is irrational to assume that a person is not qualified to vote or to serve as a juror simply because she has brown hair or brown skin. It is neither irrational, nor invidious, however, to assume that a black resident of a particular community is a Democrat if reliable statistical evidence discloses that 97% of the blacks in that community vote in Democratic primary elections. See Brief for United States 44. For that reason, the fact that the architects of the Texas plan sometimes appear to have used racial data as a proxy for making political judgments seems to me to be no more ''unjustified,'' ante, at __ (opinion of O'CONNOR, J.), and to have no more constitutional significance, than an assumption that wealthy suburbanites, whether black or white, are more likely to be Republicans than communists. 29 Requiring the State to ignore the association between race and party affiliation would be no more logical, and potentially as harmful, as it would be to prohibit the Public Health Service from targeting African-American communities in an effort to increase awareness regarding sickle-cell anemia. 30 173 Despite all the efforts by the plurality and the District Court, then, the evidence demonstrates that race was not, in all likelihood, the ''predominant'' goal leading to the creation of District 30. The most reasonable interpretation of the record evidence instead demonstrates that political considerations were. In accord with the presumption against interference with a legislature's consideration of complex and competing factors, see n. 9, supra, I would conclude that the configuration of District 30 does not require strict scrutiny.