the purchase to her American Express card. (a) The District Court properly dismissed the claims against the federal appellees. Congress, too, responded to the problem of vote dilution. Limited by its own terms to cases involving unusually shaped districts, the Court's approach nonetheless will unnecessarily hinder to some extent a State's voluntary effort to ensure a modicum of minority representation. It is shortsighted as well, for a regularly shaped district can just as effectively effectuate racially discriminatory gerrymandering as an odd-shaped one.9 By focusing on looks rather than impact, the majority "immediately casts attention in the wrong direction-toward superficialities of shape and size, rather than toward the political realities of district composition." Northbound and southbound drivers on 1-85 sometimes find themselves in separate districts in one county, only to "trade" districts when they enter the next county. 633, 637 (1983). The Court found that race could not be the deciding factor when drawing districts. 92-357 Argued: April 20, 1993 Decided: June 28, 1993. The question before us is whether appellants have stated a cognizable claim. Does the Equal Protection Clause prevent a State from drawing district boundaries for the purpose of. As long as members of racial groups have the commonality of interest implicit in our ability to talk about concepts like <"minority voting strength," and "dilution of minority votes," cf.Thornburg v. Gingles(1986), and as long as racial bloc voting takes place, legislators will have to take race into account in order to avoid dilution of minority voting strength in the districting plans they adopt. The wide range of opinions represented in the ruling have made it challenging for subsequent cases to use New York Times v. United States as precedent. 1 See Cousins v. City Council of Chicago, 466 F.2d 830, 848-852 (CA7) (Stevens, J., dissenting), cert. The message that such districting sends to elected representatives is equally pernicious. The central explanation has to do with the nature of the redistricting process. Today we hold only that appellants have stated a claim under the Equal Protection Clause by alleging that the North Carolina General Assembly adopted a reapportionment scheme so irrational on its face that it can be understood only as an effort to segregate voters into separate voting districts because of their race, and that the separation lacks sufficient justification. NO racial gerrymandering; race cannot be the sole or predominant factor in redrawing legislative boundaries; majority-minority districts. Indicate whether each account would flow into the income statement, retained earnings statement, or balance sheet. Thus, for example, awarding government contracts on a racial basis excludes certain firms from competition on racial grounds. As we have said, "it requires no special genius to recognize the political consequences of drawing a district line along one street rather than another." Freedom of Speech, Assembly, and Association. The States certainly have a very strong interest in complying with federal antidiscrimination laws that are constitutionally valid as interpreted and as applied. Richmond v. J. The State's revised plan contained a second majority-black district in the north-central region. After the 1990 census, the North Carolina General Assembly was entitled to a 12th seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and redrew its congressional districts to account for the changes in population. Racial classifications of any sort pose the risk of lasting harm to our society. Lacking support in any of the Court's precedents, the majority's novel type of claim also makes no sense. 5. This case involves two of the most complex and sensitive issues this Court has faced in recent years: the meaning of the constitutional "right" to vote, and the propriety of racebased state legislation designed to benefit members of historically disadvantaged racial minority groups. Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U. S. 30, 46-51 (1986), and as long as racial bloc voting takes place,l legislators will have to take race into account in order to avoid dilution of minority voting strength in the districting plans they adopt.2 One need look. Shaw v. Reno arose from a push to get greater representation for Black voters in North Carolina. And while Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U. S. 497, 500 (1954), held that requiring segregation in public education served no legitimate public purpose, consideration of race may be constitutionally appropriate in electoral districting decisions in racially mixed political units. They were the first blacks to represent North Carolina, a state with a 20 percent black population, since 1901. Shaw v Hunt. Two others concluded that the statute did not minimize or cancel out a minority group's voting strength and that the State's intent to comply with the Voting Rights Act, as interpreted by the Department of Justice, "foreclose[d] any finding that [the State] acted with the invidious purpose of discriminating against white voters." Appellants, five North Carolina residents, filed this action against appellee state and federal officials, claiming that the State had created an unconstitutional racial gerrymander in violation of, among other things, the Fourteenth Amendment. Washington v. Davis, 426 U. S. 229, 239 (1976). He read JUSTICE WHITE'S opinion in UJO to authorize race-based reapportionment only when the State employs traditional districting principles such as compactness and contiguity. No analogous purpose or effect has been alleged in this case. Action verbs tell what the subject is doing or what is being done to the subject. Whites constitute roughly 76% of the total population and 79% of the voting age population in North Carolina. In the 1992 elections voters in both districts selected black representatives. The U.S. Supreme Court and the federal government should encourage states to find ways to comply with the act, even if compliance results in oddly shaped districts, the attorney argued. A second distinction between districting and most other governmental decisions in which race has figured is that those other decisions using racial criteria characteristically occur in circumstances in which the use of race to the advantage of one person is necessarily at the obvious expense of a member of a different race. Race in redistricting is permissible as long as configurations are not too extreme, Christina Dejong, Christopher E. Smith, George F Cole, Government in America: Elections and Updates Edition, George C. Edwards III, Martin P. Wattenberg, Robert L. Lineberry. This small sample only begins to scratch the surface of the problems raised by the majority's test. The second type of unconstitutional practice is that which "affects the political strength of various groups," Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U. S. 55, 83 (1980) (STEVENS, J., concurring in judgment), in violation of the Equal Protection Clause. With these considerations in mind, we have limited such claims by insisting upon a showing that "the political processes were not equally open to participation by the group in question-that its members had less opportunity than did other residents in the district to participate in the political processes and to elect legislators of their choice." As for this latter category, we. But nothing in our case law compels the conclusion that racial and political gerrymanders are subject to precisely the same constitutional scrutiny. Some 90 years later, Alabama redefined the boundaries of the city of Tuskegee "from a square to an uncouth twenty-eight-sided figure" in a manner that was alleged to exclude black voters, and only black voters, from the city limits. See also Wygant v. Jackson Bd. After population gains tracked by the 1990 census, North Carolina was able to get a 12 th Congressional seat for the state. As was the case in New York, a number of North Carolina's political subdivisions have interfered with black citizens' meaningful exercise of the franchise and are therefore subject to 4 and 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Rather, the issue is whether the classification based on race discriminates. no further than the Voting Rights Act to understand that this may be required, and we have held that race may constitutionally be taken into account in order to comply with that Act. Example: A group\underline{\text{group}}group of applicants answered\underline{\underline{\text{answered}}}answered the advertisement. What trade-offs are involved in deciding to have a single large, centrally located facility instead of For the reasons stated by JUSTICE WHITE, the decision of the District Court should be affirmed. The District Court in Pope dismissed appellants' claim, reasoning in part that "plaintiffs do not allege, nor can they, that the state's redistricting plan has caused them to be 'shut out of the political process.''' Id., at 179 (opinion concurring in judgment) (some citations omitted). Nor if dilution is proven is there any need for further constitutional scrutiny; there has never been a suggestion that such use of race could be justified under any type of scrutiny, since the dilution of the right to vote can not be said to serve any legitimate governmental purpose. Tr. against anyone by denying equal access to the political process. They also stated: "'Our argument is that the history of the area demonstrates that there could be-and in fact was-no reason other than race to divide the community at this time.'" Ibid. Appellants are five residents of Dur-. Supp., at 475-477 (opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part). (1) The Common Cause District Court concluded that all but one of the districts in North Carolina's 2016 Plan violated the Equal Protection Clause by intentionally diluting the voting strength of Demo crats. The group claimed that the districts were racial gerrymanders that violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. UJO, supra, at 148. It therefore warrants different analysis. APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF NORTH CAROLINA. Redistricting legislation that is alleged to be so bizarre on its face that it is unexplainable on grounds other than race demands the same close scrutiny, regardless of the motivations underlying its adoption. As for representative democracy, I have difficulty seeing how it is threatened (indeed why it is not, rather, enhanced) by districts that are not even alleged to dilute anyone's vote. It reinforces racial stereotypes and threatens to undermine our system of representative democracy by signaling to elected officials that they represent a particular racial group rather than their constituency as a whole. See ante, at 634-635. Allen v. State Bd. Nor, because of the distinctions between the two categories, is there any risk that Fourteenth Amendment districting law as such will be taken to imply anything for purposes of general Fourteenth Amendment scrutiny about "benign" racial discrimination, or about group entitlement as distinct from individual protection, or about the appropriateness of strict or other heightened scrutiny. to Brief for Federal . Under the three-part test established by Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U. S. 30, 50-51 (1986), a minority group must show that it could constitute the majority in a single-member district, "that it is politically cohesive," and "that the white majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it usually to defeat the minority's preferred candidate." Legislation that classifies a person or group of people solely based on their race is, by its nature, a threat to a system that strives to achieve equality, the majority opined. See 808 F. e., an intent to aggravate "the unequal distribution of electoral power." the question in gerrymandering cases is "whether a particular group has been unconstitutionally denied its chance to effectively influence the political process," id., at 132-133. Wright is relevant only to the extent that it illustrates a proposition with which I have no problem: that a complaint stating that a plan has carved out districts on the basis of race can, under certain circumstances, state a claim under the Fourteenth Amendment. Indeed, as a brief survey of decisions illustrates, the Court's gerrymandering cases all carry this theme-that it is not mere suffering at the polls but discrimination in the polity with which the Constitution is concerned. The North Carolina Republican Party and individual voters brought suit in Federal District Court, alleging that the plan constituted an unconstitutional political gerrymander under Davis v. Bandemer, 478 U. S. 109 (1986). Shaw's group claimed that drawing districts based on race violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. They also point out that in 1990 a black candidate defeated a white opponent in the Democratic Party runoff for a United States Senate seat before being defeated narrowly by the Republican incumbent in the general election. Statement, O. T. 1991, No. argument that racial gerrymandering poses no constitutional difficulties when the lines drawn favor the minority, since equal protection analysis is not dependent on the race of those burdened or benefited by a particular classification, Richmond v. J. But numerous North Carolinians did. The Attorney General did not object to the General Assembly's revised plan. They did not even claim to be white. The voting age population of North Carolina is approximately 78% white, 20% black, and 1% Native American; the remaining 1% is predominantly Asian. Part of the explanation for the majority's approach has to do, perhaps, with the emotions stirred by words such as "segregation" and "political apartheid." Id., at 59. Written and curated by real attorneys at Quimbee. Rule Civ. The Justices disagreed only as to whether the plaintiffs had carried their burden of proof at trial. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act forbids districting plans that will have a discriminatory effect on minority groups. Instead, the Court creates a new "analytically distinct," ibid., cause of action, the principal element of which is that a districting plan be "so bizarre on its face," ante, at 644, or "irrational on its face," ante, at 652, or "extremely irregular on its face," ante, at 642, that it "rationally cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to segregate citizens into separate voting districts on the basis of race without sufficient justification," ante, at 652. Central explanation has to do with the nature of the voting age population in North,... ( 1976 ) appellants have stated a cognizable claim or predominant factor in legislative. Responded to the political process at 179 ( opinion concurring in judgment ) ( some citations omitted ) small only... 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