A North Carolina majority-minority gerrymander

From: A Virginia Reader [Email him]

I believe James Kirkpatrick was off-target in his analysis of the recent Supreme Court ruling on the gerrymandering. While he was correct that it would threaten more GOP seats by placing more minorities in formerly heavily GOP districts, he also viewed it as a loss for far-left black representatives.

He writes, "The decision will stop gerrymandering designed to pack black voters into black districts in order to elect black representatives. Obviously, this will have the effect of cutting down on the far-left black representatives that essentially run unopposed in their districts."

However I doubt this change will cut down on the far-left black representatives, it's just they will win with a smaller margin, say 65% instead of 90%, but still plenty to assure victory.

Instead, the other 25% will be voting in more Republican districts, making additional Democratic Party victories more possible. That's the intention of this Supreme Court ruling, that redistricting must still pack enough so minorities choices prevail ("what must be preserved is the 'ability to elect' minority preferred candidates of choice" according to J. Christian Adams), but once that is safely met minorities should be distributed into other districts to maximize their voices elsewhere. I.E., redistricting must be optimized to ensure the greatest power of minority voices, in other words, Democratic voters.

Left-wing interest groups such as the Alabama Legislative Black Caucus and Alabama Democratic Conference brought this case to the Supreme Court and got the ruling they wanted. Liberal Supreme Court justices ruled in favor of it while conservative justices opposed it.

The larger issue is that it appears to remain fine for Democrats when redistricting to minimize the number of Republican seats by lumping whites into a few nearly all-white districts in order to create more minority-dominant ones, but Republicans may not do the same with minority voters.

Redistricting to favor your party is a long-standing procedure done by both parties whenever they control a state legislature, but now the Supreme Court is effectively saying that Republicans must redistrict using the same algorithms the Democrats use, to the benefit of the Democratic Party.

James Fulford writes: Of course, the reason that this benefits Democrats is that blacks vote more than 90 percent Democrat, approaching 99 percent when someone like Obama is on the ticket. And the Voting Rights Act is written so that only minorities can benefit. That's why Steve Sailer wrote The Voting Rights Act: Time To Include Whites.