Last October, a panel of federal judges ruled that Virginia’s congressional district map is unconstitutional due to racial gerrymandering in the 3rd Congressional District. After this decision, the Supreme Court sent a case challenging a redistricting plan in Alabama back to a lower court for further review. Given this previous case, when the case regarding Virginia’s 3rd District came to the Supreme Court this past March, the Court remanded the case back to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. This means the U.S. District Court will reexamine its original decision, which required that the General Assembly produce a new map by April 2015.
Racial gerrymandering is a form of redistricting that aims to pack minority voters into one or few districts, so that while they have the voting power to gain one representative in the respective representative body, their votes are confined to just one district. In Virginia, the 3rd District, according to the October ruling, was intentionally drawn to concentrate African-Americans in that district, which directly violates the Fourteenth Amendment.
While the Supreme Court’s recent decision complicates what we can expect from the General Assembly, according to a lawyer for the plaintiffs in the Virginia case, it is unlikely the federal court in Virginia will make a different ruling upon its reexamination. This is pretty logical: the 3rd District, which leads from Richmond to Hampton Roads, is the state’s only black-majority district; when the General Assembly last redrew the district’s boundaries, they increased the voting population that was African-American from 53 to 56 percent.
It is extremely disappointing that the General Assembly has yet to produce a new, fairer map. What the General Assembly has done so far has actually been contrary to the goal of undermining gerrymandering: this past session, the General Assembly passed numerous bills tweaking existing districts to make them less competitive instead of properly responding to the U.S. District Court’s initial ruling. While Gov. Terry McAuliffe vetoed these bills, the failure of the General Assembly to properly address a racially imbalanced map — and instead promote even more unfair redistricting — is not what we should expect from our lawmakers.
To constrict votes to one area in order to dilute power is a direct challenge to the functioning of a representative democracy. To do so in ways that are racially based is nothing short of oppressive. When the representatives who design districts place groups in a position in which they have markedly less power than their would-be equals, they make fighting oppression or pursuing laws specific to a particular group the job of the oppressed — especially if there is only one representative who has to answer to that group’s vote.
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